The Tree of Nature
In my youth, when I felt like escaping from my troubles, I wouldn't run away; I would run up. Cradled in the protective arms of the tree, I could vent my troubles, calm my nerves or find a quiet spot to read a book. The tree offered a patient ear for my childish prayers, rebukes and frustrations; it did not judge or preach to me. The silence it offered was all the reassurance I needed.
When I discovered Norse cosmology during a school skiing trip one winter and an Icelandic girl told me about an immense and central sacred tree called Yggdrasill, I was immediately hooked. This "world tree" in Nordic myth symbolises the natural world existing in a state of harmony that nevertheless cannot be taken for granted: a symbiotic system that may - or may not - withstand all the depredations that humanity inflicts upon it.
It resonated with me, deeply. The tree became like family; from an early age, I decided to live my life in a way that would do no harm to the tree, and to protect my adoptive family as best as I could. Even now, in cynical adulthood, I can't see a tree being chopped down or burnt, without somewhere in me there being the childish sense of some great loss - and of failure.
What the world of grown ups see as a commodity, I see as living beings, and it has always been my love of trees that informs me on I should live: how adapting to change is necessary for survival, how there is great wisdom hidden in silence and how essential it is in life to stand apart, and yet together. Individually and collectively - how more beautiful the picture becomes when one stands peaceably together as indviduals for the right cause.
So wrote the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet in his poetic plea to an individual's yearning to stand alone and free like a tree, and yet as one in fraternity, like a forest of trees. The times we live in now invite us to heed these words more so than ever in over half a century. The utter chaos we have all recently lived through with the rise in the cost of living, global pandemics, and territorial wars should be a testament and warning that we must all actively search for ways to live peaceably with one another.
Nature has so much to teach us. Italian poet, writer and philosopher Dante Alighieri wrote that nature is the art of God. If you have trouble with the word "God", Protestant theologian Paul Tillich wrote to take whatever is central and most meaningful to your life and call that God. To me, everything in nature - the complexity, the biodiversity, the symbiotic relationships - is the same thing other people attribute to God. And even if life invariably shows us that God is the art of man, and nature is the art of science, as a child, I always thought nature and God were the same thing.
For me, God has always been in the tree. When I touched a tree, I felt as though I touched the face of God. It was not merely something one ran to in times of need; it was that to which one clung for reassurance and climbed for sanctuary, and within its leaves confessed one's innermost fears without worry of recrimination. It did not ask for worship; it asked for nothing and yet gave everything.
I have often wondered whether we would be in a better position to understand the planet today if humans had not carved religious dieties in their own image, while shunning their previous beliefs based on the observations of the world at work. Both are filled with just as much myth and superstition, but, in my opinion, nature is the better role model. I like to believe that our observations in time would have become sophisticated enough to understand the intricacies of nature, to realise that peaceful adaptation is the long term solution necessary for survival, rather than the short term results of defensive violence.
I mean, you must take living so seriously/that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees— and not for your children, either/but because although you fear death you don’t believe it/because living, I mean, weighs heavier."
- Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963), "On Living"
The tree is the perfect symbol for survival. One cannot help but admire the great oak that stands as yield from the smallest acorn, or the yew tree that stands for wisdom in its longevity, or the hardy olive tree for its fruit and fertility in difficult climes. All three have taught me valuable lessons, but none more so than the olive tree - and in all the lands its strong roots have touched.
I fell in love with Aitoliko first, before I fell in love with the woman who had invited me there. She told me Aitoliko's old town was like a "Little Venice", Greece's own watery slice of La Serenissima. I hailed from Cyprus, so the Venetian ambience and Greek influences invariably pulled me into a web of streets that caught me instantly. It was love at first sight.
Eirini, the woman in question, had sent me a picture of herself along with the brief invite. I remember it still: Pale skin shining alabaster in the white sun, with long, thick raven hair and, curiously, the mischievous eyes of a Turk, set upon a curvaceous frame leaning against a shop that sold evil eye pendants and plaster goddesses. I wrote back and thanked the dark Aphrodite, but was cautious: Turkish expansion had caused the decline of Venice, Greece and Cyprus; so I asked her, was she not afraid to welcome such a barbaric conqueror to her shores? Like the olive tree, we have survived for centuries, and we will survive you, she had written back.
I was intrigued enough to find myself in the old Greek town staring into the waters of its slate-grey lagoon three days later. I stayed a week. And what a week it was. November in Aitoliko is like no other: As the spiders cast their webs, fishermen cast their nets, and the sun casts a long shadow across distant mountains in the twilight. And come the morning, olive oil is drunk like wine in Aitoliko. The bread is made by hand. Love-making is a daily ritual that starts the day; a heady sweat mingles with the dew to scatter burnt jasmine, bread and wine to scent the heated sea air.
One memory, of one such morning will stay with me until my end. Eirini was preparing breakfast, and was calling me to the kitchen for the umpteenth time, but from the bedroom window I had spied an elderly man planting an olive tree. He looked the spitting image of my father, and so I watched mesmerised. I was reminded of Hikmet's poem "On Living", and in that moment, it dawned on me, why in Cyprus my own father, in his seventies, had planted an olive tree in his garden. This is how we survive the fear of dying, I had thought, by holding on to the hope of living.
Holding on to the hope of life. It's a good lesson to learn: Living should weigh heavier. Yet, we treat it very lightly, so quick are we to war - and kill. The current wars in Ukraine and Gaza show we have yet to learn how precious life is, but then, humanity is a poor student, not just of nature, but of history. Naturally, if one believes in religious prophecy, then one will think humanity pious and merciful, and that there will be some eleventh hour rescue, and yet our historical treatment of the tree tells a different story.
One such recent story is that of the Sycamore Gap tree. It was a landmark believed to be about 300 years old and stood beside Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland; I say was because it was cut down overnight last September. The wilful felling of the ancient monument touched me in a way that, I guess, the death of a celebrity would touch anyone else. The tree was world-famous, but it was also a symbol of history - as ancient monuments usually are.
To me now, however, it is symbolic of more than just history. It symbolises the heavy handedness of one's existence on the planet; what had taken one or two centuries to grow was cut down in a night. Another part of Nature wounded for no other reason than it existed, and because some human had the means to destroy it.
- Sônia Guajajara
If humanity does not learn to love (or at the very least respect) Nature, humanity will not survive. The COVID pandemic came and we did not peacefully adapt to its coming, we violently ignored it. Indeed, the pandemic was a direct offset of our violence to the environment; we have been violent against Nature so long that she is finally fighting back. In some parts of the world, people consume a credit card's worth of plastic each week, as a result of tiny fragments called nanoplastics that infiltrate our blood, wombs and breastmilk, which we introduced into the ecosystem.
If we were connected with the very heart of this planet's being, we would know the futility of warring for control over things we have no control over. The futility of desiring control is a loaded gun with a hair trigger. Our desire for it can become so great there comes a point where there is no give, no acceptance aside from the narrowest form, and tolerance is only shown at the bare minimum. We become controlled by our restrictions. We, in effect, shoot ourselves in the foot.
This dominating human need for power and control, in part, is why, even when science tells us how life happened, we prefer to believe in religious prophecy when it tells us different. It's not merely the desire for the illusion of control over a world that is uncontrollable; to give up our religious constructs is to go against the ego of humanity. When your own ego is the most central and meaningful thing in your life - and you call it "God" - you dislocate yourself from the very nature of life and your own fundamental being.
American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested in his essay "The Transcendentalist" that solitude is a state of being that should be encouraged, for it allows humanity to achieve a higher level of alignment with nature and prevents the contamination that one encounters within a society. Reading the news about the Sycamore Gap tree, I thought: What level of contamination from society did the person suffer, and how distanced from the beauties of Nature must they have been, to fell this wonderous tree? It's beyond my comprehension. I couldn't imagine carving my initials into the bark of a living being, let alone cutting it down for no discernible reason.
Trees are amazing beings. They detoxify what poisons us. Their very image can comfort us. They are also our greatest archives, because underneath their bark, trees harbour the annals of this planet's history. In a forest in southern Chile, there is a giant tree believed to be more than 5,000 years old, which people call the "Great Grandfather". It's a clock that keeps and records time. A font of valuable information, it's a time capsule that can offer a window into the past. If that is not a god-like superpower, I don't know what is.
The information these ancient trees store is not only a testament to the miraculous nature of their survival, but can also teach us how to survive past calamities as well, such as solar storms, when the sun emits huge bursts of energy. Ancient alpine tree rings have helped researchers identify the biggest known solar storm in history, and the discovery illustrates the immense power of solar storms - and underscores the danger they pose today. That is valuable information for understanding and surviving them.
If these trees disappear, so, too, will disappear an important key, which in time might help us to unlock the mysteries of how life adapts to changes on the planet. Every time we cut down a tree and burn it, we not only release carbon monoxide gases into the atmosphere, we are burning a book filled with infinite wisdom on how to survive and adapt in nature. If we destroy Nature's self-help books, and burn down her libraries, soon we will forget how to read them and will become blind to the life that stands in front of us: Gigantic, majestic and miraculous life - which we continue to chop down without the requisite thought or care.
When the last tree dies on this planet, so, too, will God.
The Nature of Human Nature
Imagine if one didn't have any religious constructs to stunt their growth - and thus never applied it to any idealogy or political point of view - but was instead informed by Nature at a young age. Would this not give the person a healthy respect for life? When I believed Nature and God to be the same thing, I grew up never desiring control or power. I never allowed my ego to give me meaning. I wanted to be like a tree.
The tree that survives 5,000 years has no controlling method for longevity, but a willingness to adapt in order to survive. And the fact there are so few of those trees remaining on this planet is also a testament to the rule of entropy - the general trend of the universe toward death and disorder. In her infinite wisdom, Nature shows us that one has no need to fear those two words: When it is a natural death, its purpose is to bring forth new life.
How can one fear death with the knowledge that when our bodies die, and we are interred in the earth, for example, our gut microbes are still alive and have a purpose. Long after the rest of the body dies, the surviving microbes in the gut then mix with the community of microorganisms in the soil to speed up the decomposition process, turning the body into a recycling plant that allows new life to flourish. Our natural death, our green burial can benefit the local environment, serving as a recycling mechanism that creates food for hundreds of species.
The way of entropy also teaches us that nothing is forever. The foremost lesson of nature is that from nothing we came, to nothing we shall go. So, what are we fighting for? If Nature tells us we are a grain of sand on a shore we cannot comprehend, destined to be washed away into a great ocean, then it doesn't matter who you are, or where you come from or how much you earn. Or how much of the world you temporarily control. The last queen of the United Kingdom had no more control in life than she did in death. The quality of her casket may change. The amount of mourners may differ. But we all share the same shore, we are made from the same sand and the sea comes for us all in the end.
If we could heed this lesson on life before death, then we would realise the amount of time and tides we have wasted on trying to control our lives, and the lives of others. We would be wiser to see that at the heart of our being there is one thing that is central in unifying us, and it isn't the need for power or control. And funnily enough, if we were to shun human society for nature (just for a little while), we would discover the lesson of what unifies us lies there.
You see it with the much maligned wolf. You see it with the beloved bear. Family. Community. The collective effort. In nature these are formed for survival, for very real, physical and biological reasons. But for humans, to connect and to communicate is not merely to survive; it gives the need for survival some meaning beyond the biological.
We may believe religion provides the same spiritual belonging, but it divides more than it unites: During the most recent - most devastating - Israeli conflict in Gaza I've had religious people not only complain about my blog, but actively try to hack my account, and delete it. The reason? I haven't decried one side or the other. How can I? The murder of Israeli women and children injures one's soul just as much as the senseless deaths of Palestinian innocents. I am neither Palestinian nor Israeli, but I am human. The children dying are our children, the hostages held are members of our family, regardless of colour or creed. One cannot turn away from suffering; people owe it to common humanity not to ignore inhumanity, wherever it occurs, but the news coverage from Israel and Gaza is the most extensive coverage of extreme violence I can recall in my adult life.
I want to write about it, but I find the very breath of my lungs fail me as I read about the rising death toll of Israeli retribution, which has decimated any moral distance between them and Hamas, and allied them with the extreme far-right. Without a mutually acceptable way of ending the conflict, more generations of Palestinians and Israelis will be sentenced to more wars. So, how is it right to make this about one side or the other? Who is to say one life, or one cause, is more valuable, when in our desire for control we have felled so many saplings that will never share in the joys of life. In this shared shame, we all have blood on our hands; no religion can claim the higher ground. If one believes they are following the will of their God, it makes it impossible to persuade them to accept a secular compromise and to break deeply-held prejudices.
To relinquish control of what you believe is not easy, but it isn't just about relinquishing control; the point is one must be aware that the concept of control is a fallacy. It is momentary. It is fleeting. The tools of all tyrants are extinguished by time. Death shows us this in the final moment of its coming, and yet, that very fact doesn't stop people from trying to gain control of an exsistence that cannot be controlled.
- Prof. Gordon Allport (1964)
Indigenous peoples, who are distinct social and cultural groups that share ancestral ties to the lands they live, or once lived, on, see ownership or control (especially of land) as bizarre. The Piaroa people of Venezuela totally dismiss the concepts of ownership, competition, vanity, and greed. Men and women are believed to be of equal status, and they're against any type of violence. And when a child is born in the Orang Rimba tribe of Indonesia, the umbilical cord is planted under a tree. It's believed that the child has a sacred bond with that tree, and cutting it down is equivalent to murder.
The spirituality the land offers is anything but easy, and human Churches will argue that, unlike them, Mother Nature is in no position to make ethical demands of its flock. But indigenous people would disagree; nature teaches us that everyone reaps what one sows. Throughout history, from the Americas to Asia, indigenous peoples have been marginalised and denied their right to their own existence, which is something that still happens to this day. With the lack of formal recognition over their territories, natural resources, and cultures, they still face a lot of prejudice and inequality. It's not nature failing in its ethics that one can see here.
There is some hint in Hikmet's poem "On Living" that we plant the olive tree not to control our fear of death but as a testament to life; we plant the tree to tend because it gives life a purpose. When Mother Nature is the religion and the Earth her Church, and one makes a covenant to respect both, then there is a purpose to living. Make no mistake, even human religions today that preach for you to relinquish control to their peaceful dictats, still push the illusion of control and the ego of man. It just places the control in different hands - hands that are just as ready to war. And instead of any acceptance of difference (religious or otherwise), one merely tolerates it, because to accept difference means to relinquish control - not to any god - but completely, in and of itself. This illusion of control, too, provides religion with a veneer of acceptability, where one is tricked into believing that, as long as one converts without coercion and their own free will, one need not question its religious prophecy.
It is outside the remit of this post to delve into the thorny philosophical issues of free will versus freedom of choice, and whether either or any exist, but there is little doubt that the answer lies hidden in the workings of nature. Science has yet to categorically observe free will in action and there is a large amount of determinism in the law of physics, but this is one illusion (if indeed it is) that has its benefits. If one feels free, then it makes them responsible for their actions; what a tree seems to know through evolution and instinct, humans need to learn through culpability.
So, I dare to ask, which is the more advanced species? If one did indeed focus on controlling oneself rather than the world, would humanity not be in a better age? But one shouldn't feel disheartened. If free will is indeed a myth, then the power to subjugate it doesn't exist either. So, why bother to expend energy controlling another's thoughts or actions? Why try and control another's form of expression? Or the beliefs they identify with? The only thing one can do is decide whether they are going to accept or tolerate a different point of view, which (as the world view changes) may not mean as much in a generation or two.
Trying to crush difference so that only your facimile survives is against nature. It's an erosion of DNA, if nothing else. On the other hand, being true to oneself is about discovery, openness and respect. None of these thrive under control. Great friendships and families that survive under the strain of adversity show us that connection and communication breaks down under the duress of control. Being true to oneself and to others is not about control, it's about communication. It's about reaching out in times of suffering to give suffering a purpose, even if we know there is none.
We should be unified in love and acceptance, surely, not in thought or belief. They should be free to be different and unique, because freedom may be messy in nature, but it is beautiful, too. It has been sixteen years since I saw Erini and her beautiful Aitoliko; I haven't been back since that heavenly week, but it isn't because of any lack of desire to so. We opened doors together that have always remained open, because we unconditionally accepted each other, and promised to communicate. Whenever she emails me from out of the blue now, I become nostalgic for that crazy youth who would just pack and go anywhere in the world. To even live in the streets if he wanted. I hope to return to Aitoliko one day, even if neither that youth nor the world he travelled exists anymore. Possibly, in a world where virtual holidays become mainstream and carbon-print measuring passports restrict movement, I might have to travel with the help of technology not yet devised, but what will remain is the feeling of family I felt from the land and her people.
When I first read Emerson's essay, the reason I sought trees as sanctuary struck me in a way I couldn't explain as a child, and it made more and more sense the older I became. But what I have also come to realise the older I get is this: I've enjoyed solitude and the embrace of nature ever since I can remember (I was going into "monk mode" before it was even a thing), but turning one's back completely on a human-centric existence is not only impossible, but unhealthy. For human society is a part of nature, too. Our human nature is one thread among many woven into Nature's tapestry. We have human connections we would miss. But we have a world we live in that we must protect. And as a human being, one needs to find a way to work with one's own species while caring for (and protecting) the other species that inhabit the planet.
The best of our human families accept the differences of their members, and know their strength lies in their diversity. Every strong family is a tribute to its individial members. As every finger on the hand is connected and yet no fingerprint on a finger is the same, so, too, can families be diverse and yet work better together than apart. That is the rule and the will of nature. And if you are of the mind that sees everything as a battle, then let me explain it in language you will understand, in as little as three words: Nature always wins. Sooner or later we will need to accept it, and that, in the long run, we shall have to respect Nature's will, even if we hold it separate and below our own.
posted by Tarkan Deluxe at 10:57 am
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