“Between every two pines is a door leading to a new life.”
I don’t have two pines in my backyard—I have one. It’s a white pine, an eastern white pine. And it’s not technically in my backyard as it belongs to the neighbor. The trunk is right up against the property line and half of its branches and canopy reach into my yard. That’s the funny thing about trees, they really don’t care about our silly property lines. They often outlast them. There was a giant Tulip Poplar that marked the back corner of the backyard where I grew up in. The house is long gone—an entire neighborhood built on the properties of five neighboring previous houses. But the Tulip Poplar remains—marking an important coordinate on the old map of that world.
The truth is that you don’t need two pines to reach a new life. One is plenty. I remember a Maya Angelou speech where she began with, “A single individual plus God constitutes a majority.” She was speaking to the Mormon Church as a Black woman with nearly an entirely White audience, and spoke those words powerfully as a source of support for herself and a reminder, it seems, that God saw the world, and its people in it, differently. And sitting on my porch it may also be that one individual plus a white pine also constitutes a majority, or a multiplicity, or an entirety. At the very least—you feel like you have all you need for the morning. The white pine is teeming with life. Initially as I look out, the world seems quiet, but then you notice a few of the needles of the white pine quivering. And as you look longer, you notice nearly all of the needles are in motion.
This giant entity that seemed quiet and still moments before is humming with life. Bees and small wasps moving in an out of the needles and cones. Birds landing on the upper branches. The birds out of sight, but the branches bouncing with their weight. Squirrels running up the trunk and in to the canopy chasing each other. The tree is so big it’s hard to take in all of the action at once. The tree is so big you no longer see it as a tree. It’s a whole universe—and I am only really talking about what I see above ground.
Like everyone else, it seems, this summer, I am reading Finding The Mother Tree and learning about the life of trees below the surface. How they are able to talk with each other and support each other with mycorrhizal fungi --- the root fungus that allows nutrients to pass from tree to tree. Once you learn about these underground networks between trees you can’t look at a tree or a forest the same way. You see them all as friends holding hands. You see the whole world interconnected in a way that seemed abstract before, but which now feels authentic and true. Which has me look at my pine and wonder what are its connections to the others trees that are nearby? Who are its friends, cousins, children? What is its relationship to the weeping cherry in the yard next door? And to the white pine two backyards away that split from a lightning strike earlier this summer? Did my pine feel the loss? Is it mourning?
Or is tree time so slow that the loss won’t be felt for a while—the way that we see starlight from stars that have since burned out? I don’t know how slow tree time is, but I think part of the reason that trees feel so healing to me is that they do hold an alternate view of time. They have the capacity to hold the busy-ness of life in their canopy and the stillness and depth in their trunk and roots. The busy part I am good at. But the stillness and depth are my learning edge, and right now my white pine is a good teacher.
© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD