Category: Trees

Over the past week, I have watched my five-year-old granddaughter defy gravity hundreds of times. In the pool, she has learned how to move her arms and legs to keep herself afloat and swim from Papa to Mama to Grandma Martha to me. On roller skates, she can keep her four-wheeled feet beneath her and …

Photo by Egor Kamelev We connect underground with myriad others like and unlike ourselves. Through our vast, branching webs, we communicate with and support each other. If danger approaches, we warn each other in ways that may not be perceptible to others. Who are we? Aboveground, our environment both feeds and challenges us. We stand …

Love is the antidote for trauma. I’m not talking about the kind of love that requires us to blunt our awareness of the terrible events we experience and hear about. I’m talking about awake love: love that takes in everything and holds us with beauty and joy in the midst of it. But trauma often …

In pagan traditions, Samhain is the New Year, the time when the old year dies away. We move into a period of darkness and rest before spring’s rebirth. Death is all around us. Leaves, first brilliant red, orange, and yellow, lie brown and rotting on the ground. Stalks of summer’s yellow sunchokes turn black, signaling …

Nurse log, Prairie Creek Redwood State Park, California, April 2021 What does it mean to know? Where does knowledge reside in the body? Who or what has knowledge? How is knowledge transmitted and received? The answers to these questions go to the root of relationships among humans and between humans and the more-than-human world. Those …

  A week ago, I sat on a wooden bench at the edge of Elk Prairie in Prairie Creek Redwood State Park, just north of Orick, California, watching the resident herd of Roosevelt elk graze. The prairie is a huge open expanse in the middle of forest dominated by coast redwood and Sitka spruce trees, …

It’s spring in the Pacific Northwest, a time when plants that pushed leaves through near-frozen winter ground begin their promiscuous blooming. Next to the hardy hellebores, narcissus and daffodils show off their yellow bonnets. Slender willow branches, brown in winter, turn spring-green as their leaves sprout. At Lake Quinault, where we spent a few days …

When I imagine the kind of human community I want to live in, I go to the forest in my mind. In the forest, there is no analogue for racism. No exclusion of certain plants from the web of connection, nurture, and support because of their physical characteristics. That would be counter to the natural …

Underground, in the dark, the roots of trees join with fungi to form mycorrhizal networks. These networks, some larger than any other organism on Earth, including blue whales, form cooperative communities. Trees of many species link together, nourish each other, alert the others to danger, share defense strategies. Trees in sunnier spots photosynthesize extra sugar …

Early Monday morning, in clouded darkness misted by rain, two hundred people gathered at the Port of Tacoma to block the gates to a construction site. Puget Sound Energy, a utility company that is now owned by a profitable group of private equity firms, leased this land to build a huge plant to process and …