The Here and Now

A few months ago, a friend recommended that I download the astrology app Co-Star on my phone. I had been thinking about my astrological chart as I only recently gained access to my original birth certificate (I was adopted), and for the first time saw the time of day I was born (11:22 p.m., and yes, I’m a night owl). I thought it might be fun and informative to see what else I could discover about my place in the universe. So now, every day my phone serves up a kind of koan or saying meant to stimulate or escalate the feelings and thoughts already swirling around in my own private cosmos: “Love is inherently a risky enterprise” (You don’t say!) or “You are in love with uncertainty” (What you talkin’ about, Willis?).

Most of the time I smile briefly, shrug off the words, and move on with my day. But earlier this week, this is what popped up on my phone: “Trees don’t worry about the future.” Wait — what? I was surprised, because lately, trees seem to be playing a significant role in my life.

I teach a class at Middlebury College where students spend most of the semester investigating a place that is meaningful to them and has informed their environmental point of view. I invite them to consider the following questions: What stories lie hidden? What people and more-than-human species have been erased or forgotten? How do your discoveries inform your environmental practices and beliefs? I find it always thrilling to watch students delve into their own backgrounds and consider campgrounds or backyards or local parks that they thought they knew only to discover that there is so much more than what meets their eyes.

This semester I decided to try something a little different. Inspired by my teaching assistant Zev York, we decided to infuse the assignment with a new component. Zev is involved in an ash tree project on campus. Like many ash trees across the country, a number of them have become infested with the emerald ash borer beetle and are dying, so they are scheduled to be cut down. This time, we invited the students to consider the plight of the ash trees that live and die in full public view, on their campus, and the role that this story plays in their universe. Zev gently guided us into conversations about death, extinction, and layers of time. And with discernment, not judgement, we considered the ash tree and all the living things that we pass every day — the species, the people, the stories — that have roots in our present whether we notice them or not.

In an earlier column, I talked about a documentary film project that includes the story of my family and is centered around a weeping cherry tree that my father gave my mother many years ago. I recently found out that the film Trees and Other Entanglements, directed by Irene Taylor (Vermilion Films) is slated to appear on HBO later this year. I haven’t watched the film yet, and I am both excited and trepidatious about it. What does it mean to have someone else tell your story? What does it mean to have someone else see you on the land? How could I have known that a cherry tree would be the door that would give light and breath to the story of my parents caring for and loving land that was never theirs?

I’m still not sure exactly what I’m supposed to take from the saying “Trees don’t worry about the future.” I mean, I’m not a tree, so yes, I worry about what’s yet to come, including my eventual passing from this earthly plane. But there’s something in there about being in the here and now — about being present, about seeing what is right in front of me. It reminds me of the importance of being open to the mystery and the possibility of life and of loving fully. And I must admit that’s kind of scary. Because taking that risk of loving and being open means also opening ourselves up to loss.

After all, all of us, humans and more-than-humans, will return to dust eventually. Perhaps it is as Henry David Thoreau says: “There’s no remedy for love but to love more ….”