Learning to Love Trees

I haven't blogged in months and I miss it. I like taking the time to write, to get a bunch of scatter brained thoughts into an organized set of sentences and paragraphs that convey a point. The world is crazy, and I want a rest. As summer ticks by and I feel like I'm spending more time on planes and in cars than under trees running, bicycling and hiking I feel sad. Plus, getting a sickness on vacation that was probably Covid doesn't help.

My wife and I have gotten into trees. There are many dimensions to this, it's not one particular type of tree or one particular place, there are many different trees and tree places that inspire us. 

Pacific Bonsai Museum - Nearly 50 Year Old Forest

Eating Lunch in Front of a Western Red Cedar

Something like 25 years ago I watched the Karate Kid and saw bonsai trees for the first time. I'm not sure why little trees seem to connect with humans, but they do, and this experience isn't limited to just me. So two years ago when we were outfitting my apartment in Oakland with a few plants, my wife decided to buy me a $12 juniper seedling, and I had my first bonsai. Two winters later it's still growing! I'm not even sure exactly how many little bonsai trees my wife and I now own, something like 15, but one looks like it just died when we were on vacation and I bought three more not start on another project or two.

On the other end of the size spectrum, while driving up the northern California coast almost two years ago we went to visit a number of coastal redwood parks, and loved it. Seeing huge trees like that is magical. They are incredibly tall, so thick at the base, and thanks to science fiction movies like Star Wars, feel like we are on a different planet. Since then we've traveled to see giant sequoia trees, huge western red cedars and douglas fir trees all around the west coast of North America. 

It's easy to take trees for granted when you have a lot of them. But as we have gotten more and more into learning about trees and forests we've come to see stumps from clear cuts that are dozens of years, maybe over a hundred years old. We see them in the middle of forests that look healthy as well as in fields without trees. After seeing thousands of stumps it hits home how limited these really big 300+ year old trees are. One take away is how delicate the opportunity to see these trees is. What I mean by that is, you can kill a bonsai by forgetting to water it for two weeks in a heat wave. You can also cut down an 8 foot diameter tree in a matter of hours. Yet that bonsai could be two hundred years old, or that giant tree could be four hundred years old. Decades or even centuries can go into growing a tree and in a matter of even hours that tree's story can be over. 

Life and death for humans and animals is the same, but sometimes that can feel like a really heavy item to address. We are all survivors of the last four years, as the Covid pandemic forever changed the world. With artificial intelligence, social media, and the modern world it can feel like the world is flying by, changing at such a rapid pace that we can't keep up. Then we see a tree. A tree that has lived in the same place for hundreds of years. A tree that has seen droughts, fires and floods, disease and flourishing bumper crops, and is still there. There is a strength and permanence to a 1000+ year old tree that just doesn't feel replicated in anything else I know. 

I'm sharing this today because there is a lot of peace and comfort in trees so if you are looking for some, and can't find it in your usual place, look for a tree.