Dear Future Arcadian, Hug a Tree
by Abhainn Bajus
September 29
Dear Future Arcadian,
If you are anything like me, you only use others’ systems of organization and categorization when it suits you – and it rarely suits you. In my experience logical systems leave little room for my own initiative understanding of and explanations for my world. And yet, humans are as much as we resist it, very prone to categorizing, organizing, and defining nearly everything we experience. Even as I reject one person’s definition for an experience or being. I create my own classification for that very experience or being. I am constantly writing ad re-writing my own understanding of the world around me – and I’m sure you are too. All that is to say, the tree and fern ID project was very difficult or me. In one of our classes, we spend the first half of the semester collecting, identifying, and preserving samples of the trees and ferns that we encounter in Arcadia and on field trips. I was very excited about the project; I love learning about the natural world, especially in a hands – on class. Ultimately, it was the classification aspect that gave me pause. I was so intimidated by learning a new way of defining my world that I missed a deadline and pulled too many late nights just to finish u ID book.
Please, don’t wait until the night before it’s due to start it – you might not have a Mt. Joy CD to get you through that night. And, when you still need extra time, your Whiteface field trip will most likely happen, uncanceled.
Why was that ID process so scary? Maybe because I thought that if I say the world through someone else’s definition, I’d lose my own, or that my own experience would be rendered less valid. I clung to my own perceptions and struggled to see another, entirely valid reality, though it was literally at my fingertips. One moment in particular illustrates what an intensely weird experience this was.
On the day our half drafts were due (for only the tree ID book!), I became so frustrated and freaked out by the ID process (and my own procrastination) that I had to physically step away. I rushed out of the kitchen, tears welling in my eyes as I ran down the path. It was a beautiful day, blue sky, leaves almost ready to change, but I was too “in my head” to notice. I’d waited for too long to start taping my collected leaves to their pages and in that moment, not 20 minutes before the first draft was due, I was stuck struggling to read the ID booklet.
It’s hard enough that the identifying characteristics can be subjective and are best approached when no stressed out, but the kicker was the numbers. The key was in a sort of chart format that used numbers to mark differing characteristics. For example, if my leaf matched characteristic (a), I would go to #6, but if it matched characteristic (b), I would go to characteristic #17. I had reached the point where the numbers refused to register and I was stuck wondering if yesterday’s sample was a white or red spruce and why. That chart-based categorization was not how I was used to knowing trees and I was frustrated at how difficult it was for me to learn.
Instead of taking samples and categorizing characteristics, I’d rather sit with the trees, make friends with them and later, write a poem telling what the branches said while waving across today’s echoing sky. Instead of defining every detail, I’d rather paint the tree as an individual among many, unique, even among its own species.
That morning, running from the kitchen, I headed down the path to one tree, then another, than another. It didn’t take long to find the right one. It didn’t matter if she was white or red pine, hemlock or balsam fir. All that mattered was that she was the perfect diameter for my arms to wrap around. I held on tightly. ‘This is familiar,’ I thought. ‘This feels right. This is ow I know trees.’ I closed my eyes and sank right in.
A few days prior, someone had told me that trees speak the language of the heart, if we are willing and open, we can speak back. I thought about what I knew in my heart about that tree. I’d seen her wave her branches in the smoke from the sauna, reach her needles into the sky in rain and on clear days and I could see how her trunk curved slightly here and there.
I looked up. She rose tall above the needle litter on the forest floor, growing slowly, growing steadily. She had been growing for a long time, regardless of anyone’s definitions. She simply was and if I was willing to just be, we could exist together for a moment outside of time. I took a breath and decided to just be.
* * *
Dear Future Arcadian,
If you had walked past just then, you would have seen me, all wrapped tight around that tree, holding on as if she was the whole world. I wouldn’t have noticed you. The tree held me as tightly as I held her.
I say gold flowing from the ground to the sky like an endless river. That flow was full of circles and patterns not unlike the shapes I saw when I looked at plant tissue through a microscope a year ago in my first college biology class. The patterns moved up and down the golden stream and sometimes they went across to a different current to flow in a different direction. They sparkled and danced, and I know, somehow, that this part of the tree was communicating with the other trees around me. I opened myself more, and for a moment, the forest around me lit up in a million colors. I was far from alone and I was so safe. I was welcome in this realm between body and spirit, between tree and human, and maybe it was because in that moment I was able to show up exactly as I was, without disguise or pretense. I wanted to lose myself here, to become a tree, to be a rising flow of light and patterns, branches in the sky, roots in the ground.
How could I go back to my ID book now? I held on tighter, my face pressed into rough bark, my hands clasped tight. I could at least try. Maybe the ID project wouldn’t be my forte, but I could give it a go. I wouldn’t lose this, whatever it was, just because I told my story in a new language; I wouldn’t lose poetry just because I spoke science. I could always find this connection again, definition or no.
I still haven’t ID-ed that beautiful tree, and I don’t need to. She’s here growing and waving in the wind off the lake and I’m here growing and waving to her when I pass her every day. Sometimes I stop for a hug and sometimes I pause my train of thought and reach out from deep inside myself. We are most certainly friends, and I’ve never felt the need to ID my friends.
* * *
Dear Future Arcadian,
Hug a tree or two or many. Don’t be afraid to learn new ways of presenting your story and don’t forget to tell your experience in your own way.
Love,
Abhainn