musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

A Life without Love is like a tree without roots


I’ve got a question, although I have to wonder whether I am the question or the answer: do I live inside my head, outside my head, or more likely in both? It’s not much of a question I realize; it’s hardly relevant to events in the average day; and anyway the answer is, well, all of the above I suspect.

The reason I ask is that I have just returned from a cold, bracing walk in the rain-soaked forest near my house in the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada. It’s something that I have done on most days since I retired I suppose, and yet today it occurred to me to ask why. I mean, is it just for the exercise; the hoarse chattering that surrounds me as the crows keep in touch with each other; the deep green of the conifers gently nodding at me in the wind? Or is it because I notice things on my walk? And that very act of noticing draws me out of myself. If I look –really look- at a tree for example, have I for a moment become that tree -incorporated it into myself? The longer I look and admire it, the less I am aware of myself as a separate entity; I only rejoin myself again when I move away…

It becomes increasingly difficult, the longer I hike, to think of myself as an interloper rather than a mobile member of the forest: an animal, a bird, a frog… Not all the trees are the same here either; most of them are coniferous but even so they form a confluence of nations sharing a common ground: cedar, fir and, almost bumping into each other, hemlock and the occasional spruce each trying to reach the sky first, but each willing to share the earth in the more open areas with alders and birch.

I don’t know the names of all the trees, but I don’t have to: as if we’d been introduced already, each seems to wave at me in the breeze as they see me coming along the trail.   

Today though, I saw them a little differently: as I let my eyes wander through the mist and into a thick grove of cedars, I began to see them as unique individuals standing around as if they were friendly neighbours, a community pleasantly gesturing to each other. I could imagine them mingling even more closely underground, their fungal strands busily connecting them and supplying not only nutrients, but gossip. Of course living so much longer than me, I also realized that perhaps their days were different than mine: the seasons passing were what they really noticed and my presence was probably only barely significant to them; but I felt noticed. Accepted.

Perhaps, but do the members of a community in a forest actually sense a bond with each other? Especially a closely knit group? To call it love is probably a human (or at least a mammalian) attribute though. A friend, a wife, or the family dog maybe, can love -but a forest?

Love, among other things, means that the loved one is still a part of you even when you are not there with them. When I was very young and in one of the early grades at primary school in 1950ies Winnipeg, I had a dog -Boots- whose kennel I would often share for a while on a weekend afternoon. He didn’t mind.

The school was only two blocks away, so he would walk with me to the school grounds and then walk home when he heard the bell ring summoning the kids to line up at the school’s front door. He would return for our brief recess of playing marbles and running around with him on the playground, and then disappear again only to return to accompany me home for lunch.

The interesting thing about those halcyon days was that if I was somewhere other than the school and Boots wasn’t with me, we were still attached; we were always connected with an invisible leash. Even now, some 70 or so years later as I think about it, I can still feel that invisible leash…

There are many types of love I suppose; it’s easy to feel one type with my human friends, or my dog; and perhaps I could feel something similar although less intensely with a forest. But could there be an analogous feeling among the trees themselves?

 I mean it would be different, of course; and I doubt it would show up in the same intense way as ours… Love doesn’t discriminate though; and maybe sharing underground connections in a community is analogous to love in a tree-world. Still, I have to wonder whether I’m being subsumed, drawn outside myself when I think like that: I am no longer just a me inside my head: I am large, I contain multitudes…

The forest, though, is obviously different; I have to open my mind more when I’m mingling with the trees if I want to see them as individuals; feel them as experiencing their lives so differently from me. But, I suppose the same effort is involved when dealing with humans; without leaving my head, I can’t assume that others are the same as me: the same likes, habits, or paths through the world. Two people crossing the same bridge is really two people crossing two bridges… I have to remind myself of that -especially in the forest.

Trees are rooted, of course; except for their seeds they don’t travel. But that doesn’t negate the fact that different things happen to them or their neighbours over the course of their lives; things to which they have to adapt if they are to survive: adjust after wind damage, fires, floods, and of course man-made damage from logging. Even with the latter, though, they still have roots, and fungal friends underground that may mitigate the pain for a while -at least while the memory lasts, and until new connections are established. Perhaps they also have invisible leashes…

A community is like that though; it implies shared burdens and common interests; it is not restricted merely to humans -or animals for that matter; I want to believe that the word recognizes the world as a community… that we are all part of a web.

But, to return to my original question of where I –well, we all- live. Are we each so distinct, so individual that we are imprisoned inside our own heads and see others only as if through a window? In a way, am I not the world: holding a seed, which, when planted, becomes so much more? Do I not have roots which spread beyond me too?

I am reminded of what Chief Seattle (an aboriginal chief from the Pacific northwest who advocated for peaceful coexistence and after whom the American city of Seattle was named) once said: ‘Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.’

 Yes, I think there really is an invisible leash connecting us all; I can often feel it tugging…

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gozzter

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