Moving along paths that meander through a sequoia forest, I delight in the nourishment the space offers to my senses. Feeling the clay earth beneath my feet, softened with newly fallen leaves and branches, echoes of a recent storm. Hearing the gentle whisper of water flowing in a nearby stream. Receiving cool, damp air into my lungs, laden with the fragrance of life renewing itself on the forest floor. Relishing in the colors and contrast that fill the space: emerald moss blanketing rock faces; amber oak leaves and auburn sequoia needles underfoot, the bright jade of new growth extending from branch tips, not yet darkened by the seasons; and inky shadows tucked into the pleats of tree trunks.
Navigating the forest floor, I cast my attention from the smooth crest of a new fern unfolding from the soil to the towering canopy of trees hundreds of years of age. I listen for lessons of arboreal resilience.
Burls and Wounding
When a tree has been wounded, when a branch is cut or the trunk damaged, the tree adopts a new pattern of growth around that space. The burl that grows in swirls and lumps is a wood stronger than that of the rest of the tree. In enveloping its wounding, a tree finds a new strength.
How might we learn from the wisdom of burls? How does this wisdom live in us?
When we experience wounding, physical or emotional, we develop new patterns of protection around the space of injury. In the case of a physical wound, our cells coordinate to promote repair. When a bone has broken and is supported to heal, it knits itself back together and that area of bone becomes denser, stronger than it was before. In the case of emotional injury, we develop adaptive mechanisms to navigate and protect ourselves from the harmful dynamic. These mechanisms are myriad and may look like heightened sensitivity to the body language of others to detect potential threat, difficulty trusting others and/or oneself, or disconnection from one’s internal landscape because that space has been filled with too much pain. These processes occur through the innate wisdom of our somas to enable our survival. Such adaptive mechanisms may be helpful for immediate survive, however over time they may deepen into patterns that become harmful to ourselves and people in our lives.
To facilitate healing, conditions must be created in which repair and transformation can take place. If a bone is broken, to heal the physicality of the injury, it is most supportive to set the injury in a cast so the body can be undisturbed as the wound mends. Creating a supportive and nurturing environment in which we can address and transform wounding in our somas is a more complex endeavor.
Perhaps people in our lives are unwilling to create space for or recognize our healing. Perhaps the wound is too raw or too deep, and more time is needed before we are ready to engage in healing work. Perhaps the layers of stress in our lives are currently too numerous and too heavy such that our resources must be allocated toward making it through each day, not delving into wounds we carry. If external and internal conditions arranged in a way that devoting effort toward healing is possible, staying steady on a healing path is an arduous practice in itself. The self-protective patterns we have developed and no longer serve us are powerful, they may be the only way in which we have come to know safety. The journey of healing is one of spiral form, a circling path. With slight adjustments in each rotation, we gain new perspective and train new helpful patterns of being within ourselves and with others.
Through our experiences of wounding and healing, how might we attend our spaces of wounding in such a way that, like a burl grows on a tree, envelopes the injury with care? How can we engage in our healing in a way that does not attempt to resolve or erase our experiences of injury, but enfolds them with strength and adaptive patterns of growth? How might we nurture slow, steady, spiraling integration of our wounds as parts of our beings?
Navigating Loss in Collectivity
The growth of a sequoia is one of encircling community. This is particularly pronounced when an elder tree has been felled. Around the severed trunk, new trees sprout forth. The loss of the mother tree creates space for new growth, not just of one new stalk, but many.
What might we learn from the wisdom of encircling community? How does this wisdom live in us?
The emergence of encircling community in the wake of loss is reflective of our individual and collective responses through grief. In teaching about the nervous system, our primary responses to threat are often named as: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. A fifth response exists that is less commonly named: flock. In the shadow of the loss of a loved one or a large-scale disaster, as humans we find solace and shelter in community. Our coming together, at wakes, funerals, and through other forms of ritual, creates spaces where we can be supported ourselves and support others. As a collective gathered in shared grief, we find resonance in the emotional experience of those around us. Such rituals allow us individually and collectively to begin to integrate the deep heart wound that is the loss of a loved one.
The importance of gathering in the wake of loss has been brought into sharp relief particularly during these difficult months of isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Too many lives have been lost, most of whom have passed away alone, unaccompanied by their loved ones. For the family members, friends, and communities who survive, they are unable to gather in their grief, to come around one another. The healing journey through grief is thwarted, as the rituals we turn to are no longer safe or permitted.
The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought immeasurable pain for millions of people. So too has it illuminated strength in and of community. Through seasons of self-isolation and physical distancing, mutual aid networks emerged and strengthened. In response to the threat of COVID-19, exacerbated through social structures that place black and brown bodied people and impoverished people at particular risk, communities find protection and support through coming together. Communities have mobilized in care to ensure community members’ needs would be met, particularly those most vulnerable.
Through our navigation of trauma and potentially traumatic events, how can we find support in community? Whereas trauma isolates, fragments, and disconnects, how can we nurture spaces and communities of care to extend support to one another, particular our members who are suffering? In a society that praises individualism and discourages vulnerability, how can we be radical in our collectivities and the authenticity of our communication of how we are (when it is safe to do so)? How can we engage in healing processes that help us re-member ourselves, individually and collectively?
Discerning Inspiration
Through the process of photosynthesis, trees and other plants absorb light, water, and carbon dioxide, transforming these elements into oxygen and chemical energy that is stored in the plant for food. This chemical energy is stored in the form of carbohydrates, contributing to the cellular structure of the plant. It is in absorbing light, water, and carbon dioxide from the external environment, a discerning inspiration, that trees and plants are given the necessary energy to grow.
What might we learn from the wisdom of the discerning inspiration of photosynthesis? How does this wisdom live in us?
We are shaped by the environments in which we are raised and the environments in which we live. This includes factors such as our familial culture, dominant societal culture, epigenetics (the way in which our ancestral history lives in our bodies), the physicality of our environment, and many more. As we navigate through life, there are factors influencing us about which we are aware to varying degrees. The extent of our awareness is often reflective of our societal positioning. The nature of privilege and oppression is that they obscure the very structures by which they operate and suppress a questioning of these structures by those who benefit most from their existence.
In the United States, a powerful factor that shapes the social, political, and economic environment is that of white-body supremacy. This form of violence, which, as Resmaa Menakem shares, is not a question a race, but a question of belonging in humanity, weaves through the structures and relationships that constitute this country. To the extent that it is part of the environment in which we live, without an awareness of how white-body supremacy works on us and through us, we continue to inhale and enact the values and practices it upholds.
Through increased awareness of the factors that shape our environment, and thus shape us (such as white-body supremacy), we can become more discerning about what we absorb and integrate into our somas. In photosynthesis, a plant does not absorb every element in its environment – it absorbs that which it can integrate and will support its growth. How might we invite the same discernment in that which we absorb and integrate into our beings? How might we recognize what in our environment nurtures our growth and what impede connection and perpetuate harm? How might we be discerning about what we have absorbed, integrating only that which nourishes our individual and collective flourishing, and expelling that which does not serve us?
On Arboreal Resilience
Opening to the wisdom of the trees, the teachings of arboreal resilience are many. As we are of nature, this wisdom is inherent within us as well. May we look to the world around us for guidance to remember the depth of knowing we hold within our individual and collective bodies.
Arboreal resilience reminds us how we can tend to our wounds with patience and strength.
Arboreal resilience reminds us how we can and do turn to one another to navigate through moments of difficulty, of loss and of disaster.
Arboreal resilience reminds us that we can be discerning about how we are shaped by the world we inhabit.
Arboreal resilience reminds us that this knowing is not a construct of the mind, but a wisdom held in the fiber of our beings.
May these reminders support us in co-creating a world that centers healing, community, and belonging.
tend arboreal
resilience. adaptive
growth, patient and strong.
References
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
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