The Hidden Power of Trees
I love trees, and they love me back. Even as a kid, without being conscious of their importance to the world, trees inspired me with their quiet power. Then as now, being among them instills peace in my heart while their natural, soulful beauty also hints at ancient mysteries held deep within.
We typically only see of a tree those parts above ground. Except for their leaves, it’s in the unseen anatomy below ground and inside their outer husks where they are alive and growing. The skeletal structure in view is mostly husk and framework built tall over time.
Many trees are giants that live hundreds of years before eventually falling to the forest floor. For maybe a hundred years thereafter, the massive cache of nutrients stored within them serves and sustains the forest around them in remarkable ways. Those fallen trees — called nurse trees — give shelter to many thousands of tiny beings, insects and crawling things, rodents and other small mammals. In this way, a nurse tree continues to support life and foster health and diversity in the forest long after what would outwardly appear to be a tree’s useful life.
In the early 2000s, in an unusually compressed time-frame, I witnessed this power firsthand. When our family first moved to New York’s Adirondack Mountains to live at the center of six million acres of wilderness preserve, we saw that the forest was terribly and irreparably damaged. Vast swaths of trees appeared to be decaying or dying from disease. We quickly learned the destruction was instead born entirely from a single, enormously ferocious ice storm just the previous winter. Thick, heavy, smothering ice swinging and swaying on a billion trees wrought carnage by forcing treetops and entire trees to the ground before, finally, the sun emerged days later to release the icy weight. The wreckage was visible everywhere. Before long, though, the storm was forgotten, and with stunning swiftness its effects were erased by a healthy, rebounding forest. The years of growth before the storm were there to help nurse the forest back to health.
What I I didn’t appreciate then is we humans possess a similar capacity to perform like trees. Through our own growth, we can exert influence and order and organize the world around us. With intention, we can do so much more during our lives than make a living. We can create processes, systems, teams, events, organizations, and even social movements. In our human world, these systems and structures, of course, often serve to oppress and marginalize, but if we create them with vision and purpose, we can instead build enduring structures that protect and nurture the lives around us, not only in the short-term but also — like the nurse tree — far into the future. Similar to the ice-storm trees, human structures can also be dismantled, and in their place we can build more equitable and just systems.
I see myself as a nurse tree for the human world. Growing strong, supporting and engaging my world around me, and building structures that will nourish the world I will eventually leave behind. Change brings endings. Which are also new beginnings. With intention and purpose, change can make new room for life to thrive.