by Brooks Riley
If I could hug a tree a day without seeming a complete idiot, I would. Trees matter to me now–how fast they grow, how full their crowns, how tall they are, how odd their leaves, how extraordinary their shapes, how thick their trunks, how nearby they are. This late interest has crept up on me, and taken hold in ways I am trying to understand.
It’s not as if I’ve taken leave of humankind, the animal kingdom—or my senses—to go live among the stately green giants. I haven’t given up all that for something else, far from it. But there are aspects of trees that seem to harmonize with what I need: Silence (I don’t need to communicate with them.); Design (The complexity of a living organism achieving its biological destiny is somehow reassuring.); Color (The range of hues, from green to orange to yellow to purple to pink, is a technicolor packaging triumph); Variety (The aesthetic intricacy of their bare black branches against a grey sky, or the hoarfrost that turns them white overnight like an old crone); Progress (Those bare branches look a lot like dentrites, reminding me that mine are still growing too); Stillness (They don’t have to move to be going somewhere.). The appeal of a tree is almost metaphoric, heralding a time when I too will fall silent, cease to move, and return to the same earth they already occupy. No hooded figure with a scythe will knock on my door. I’ll be knocking at the door of their kingdom when the time comes, a willing Philemon with or without my Baucis.
I don’t anthropomorphize trees the way Peter Wohlleben apparently does in his recent bestselling book. I am happy to learn that trees are just as social as we are, but this news has no bearing on my solitary appreciation of a tree.