Befriending a Tree

After moving to a new city, I decided to befriend a tree. What would it mean, I wondered, to spend time with a tree over a period of months, or even years? What could a tree teach me about being in a place?

I’ve read books about trees—books in which scientists and researchers parse trees apart, from apex to taproot, revealing what they’re made of and what they do. I’ve admired trees along walks in the woods, or through apartment windows. I’ve sat against them, climbed them, collected their leaves. But what, I thought, do I really know about trees? The answer to this question, it seemed, was not in a book or a scientific journal. It was not one search away on Google. I wanted to understand trees not as a broad category of ecology, but as living beings. So I set out to find a tree.

I thought it might take a week of exploring new neighborhoods and parks before I found a tree that seemed right. But when I set out from my apartment on a September morning, I somehow walked straight to the pin oak in Deering Oaks Park, standing tall and elegant in the late summer sun, endless leaves waving and whispering some ancient oak language.

I approached the tree until I was standing several feet from the trunk, the canopy above vastly greater than my field of vision. I admit to being a bit unsure of what to do next. How do you introduce yourself to a tree? I put a hand out to feel the gray-brown bark. “This is a living being,” I thought, and the thought surprised me. Trees are alive! I knew this, of course, but had never taken the time to think about what it meant. Here is a life.

I circled the trunk. I looked up into the branches, wondering how a tree could keep track of so many swoops and turns, twigs and acorns. I walked a hundred yards away, trying to see the whole tree at once, remembering that the roots beneath the mowed grass are invisible to my eyes. I walked back again.

I visited the tree for several months. I laid down in the grass and watched the birds alight on the highest branches and then take off into a blue sky. I leaned against the trunk as the squirrels scurried away with acorns. I saw the leaves turn brown and wrinkle, and one morning they were gone, fallen from the branches and already collected by park management. I checked the tree after wind storms. I researched pin oaks and learned that they drop their acorns only every two years. I invited the city arborist to meet me at the tree and tell me the history of the park. I introduced the tree to my husband and then to my father, brother, and mother. Some days, I brought my camera and took photos, some days I brought a notebook and pen, other days I brought only myself. Mostly, I tried not to do at all, though not-doing was hard. I tried to listen to the tree. I tried to feel the life beneath the bark. I tried to see the pin oak in the present moment, on this day, in this season.

I considered how being with the tree shifted my perspective of time. And I noted other shifts, some more subtle. Like any relationship, there was a slow, growing awareness and deepening familiarity that comes only with a long succession of shared moments. I began to see the tree differently, in some way that I couldn’t fully explain. And I began to see myself differently in relation to the tree. It was almost as though the practice of presence and attention was akin to that of a metalsmith forging a key. I still don’t know what it might unlock.

I invite you to befriend a tree. Sit against the trunk or lay beneath the leaves. Know that the tree’s branches above you welcome the changing sky; the roots below you are faithful and patient anchors to this place. Simply be. See what emerges.