What Trees Give Us Before We Notice

There's a recognised word, solastalgia, for the specific grief people feel when a landscape they love is suddenly damaged or destroyed. There's a tree in England that stood for centuries and came down in a single night, cut by someone who never had to answer for what it took to grow it back.

People grieved a tree they'd never touched. That's how much a tree can mean without ever saying a word.

Trees give us anchoring. Stability.

Something rooted while everything else moves. Even in a storm, when the wind is doing its worst and the rain won't let up, a tree that's built itself properly bends without breaking.

People can learn something from that when the storm is someone shouting, or the slow torment of being doubted, or worn down.

But it's what happens after the worst of it that I keep coming back to. A forest burns and looks finished.

Then something green pushes through the black within weeks, sometimes days. The baobab survives centuries of drought that would end almost anything else.

Regeneration isn't a metaphor trees perform for us. It's just what they do, quietly, without asking to be admired for it.

Have you thought about what regrows in you after the fire.

Somewhere in old wisdom, the tree is a doorway, roots reaching into what came before, branches reaching into what's coming. Ancestors, memory, the underworld and back again.

You don't need the mysticism to feel it. Stand under something that's stood for longer than your family has existed and see what settles in you.

Rooted and still alive. That's the whole ask and most days I'm only managing one of the two.