Leafy Ancestors

 

The Grandmother Tree

“I would often engage my secondary school students in the childhood art of climbing trees to do a ‘tree sit’ for an afternoon. Inspired in part by John Muir’s penchant for climbing, sitting, and ‘riding’ trees…it became one of the most effective lesson plans within my arsenal of activities designed to create experiences for youth. In keeping with the Socratic injunction that my role was to create the ‘soil’ within which the seeds of thinking could take root, and not to teach, I soon marveled at the results of this academic activity.”

Keith Badger (“Meeting Remarkable Trees,” Parabola, Summer, 2022, p.45)

          Were you a tree-climber as a child? I was. There was very little privacy in my household growing up. I didn’t have my own room as my sons did, and there was no private space in which to store my “stuff.” So, woods became a refuge for me—as an introverted, shy child, I spent a lot of alone time even then. Please don’t hear this as a lament—I loved every minute of it. Tromping through the woods, turning over rocks to see who lived under them, and climbing trees to get a lofty view of the world—my idea of a perfect day. Even then, I loved collecting interesting specimens of plants and rocks, making terrariums out of pickle jars, and for me, tree limbs felt as comfortable as my bed at home.

          In this article from the summer edition of Parabola, Keith Badger describes his experiential method of teaching secondary students about nature—the world’s and their own. On Friday afternoons, after “a week-long battery of schooling” they took to the forest and 15-20 teenagers scrambled into the canopy of the trees. He describes the “boisterous and exhilarating commotion stirred by their exciting ascent” followed by silence and calm for the next 90 minutes. His goal was not only to stimulate students to relate differently to nature, but for them to slow down long enough to think their own thoughts and allow their own questions to arise. Anyone who’s raised a teenager knows this is an amazing achievement.

          Trees are archetypal in that they defy gravity by rising into the sky yet stay rooted deep in the earth. They appear something of a mystery to us even though we live with them every day of our lives. They provide homes to myriad creatures, birds and raccoons, opossums, thousands of insects, bats, and their roots stretch out underground as wide as their branches reach above. Trees communicate with each other and if we’re listening, as Badger’s students did during their “tree time,” they communicate with us.

          Original people the world over know that trees, and all of the natural world count in the lineage of our ancestors. In fact, because of wisdom of the Indigenous Māori, New Zealand has recognized the Whanganui River as a legal person, with all rights and privileges. Native Hawaiians prevented Mark Zuckerberg from buying Indigenous lands because they considered them to be “an ancestor, a grandparent, and elder.” (Badger, p.49) In my own neighborhood, the last of the great-grandmother live oaks was cut down a few weeks ago. I can’t tell you how sad that made me.

          Reading this article in Parabola made me think about my own childhood “tree time” and how much I relied on it for nurturing. I realize now that the time I spent in trees then is what makes me feel as I do about trees now—they are my ancestors, and when I was young, they truly were my grandmothers. I hope there is a tree that you are related to, and that you visit often. And I hope that somewhere on this planet there are teachers like Keith Badger who are taking their students to the canopy to learn the lessons of the sky, the long view, and the importance rootedness. May it be so.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane