Friends,
I’d like to say something about identification. It’s something that we all sense anyway, I expect, but still, it seems worth mentioning: An identity is more than a name. The name is a starting point, not a destination.
We already know that from our experiences in school, at work, and in our neighborhoods. Learning someone’s name doesn’t mean we know that person except in a superficial sense. Picture yourself, for a moment, out walking your dog, and you see a woman who moved in down the street a few months ago. She’s out in her front yard, working on a flower bed. You know her name is Linda, but that’s about it. She looks up and says “Hi” as you draw near, so you stop and chat a bit.
She mentions that she is homeschooling her kids, and she’s catching up on some yard work while they’re on a “field trip” in the neighborhood. To make conversation, you ask if she’s homeschooling for religious reasons.
“No,” she says, “I guess you could say it’s for educational reasons. The kids used to like school, but they seemed to be getting less and less interested, both of them. They were just learning facts to answer tests so the school could get credit for teaching them SOLs. Their whole sense of what learning is about was being warped. I finally couldn’t take it any more. Joe and I talked, and I quit my job and started teaching them at home.”
“That must have been a real life change,” you say.
“It sure was,” she admits. “Then Joe’s boss had to cut him back to 30 hours a week because business is so slow, and he told Joe he’ll have to let him go if things didn’t pick up.”
“Are you going to have to go back to work then?”
“We’ll just have to see. I really don’t want to. The homeschooling is making a difference with the kids, and I love having them at home and doing things together. We seem so much more like a family. Joe and I talked, and we’re going to cut back on every expense we can and try to keep going.”
At this point, your sense of Linda’s identity is immeasurably greater than it was just a few minutes before. You know something of her history, her values, her relationships. You’ve learned that she takes her responsibilities seriously, that family is a higher priority for her than money, that she will sacrifice for things that are important to her, that she and her husband seem to share decision making and support each other.
I expect you can see where I’m headed. What I hope to provide with my presentation are the questions, the close looks, and the vocabulary that might help people gain a richer sense of the identity of trees.
I originally got caught up in the photos in the presentation because I fell in love with what the camera revealed. Time and again, when I looked through the lens, I felt—in the words of a song—“I once was blind, but now I see.” As I accumulated pictures of those moments, I felt like sharing them with other people who might also have a yearning to know trees more closely. That’s when the presentation was born.
In our paved, constructed, manufactured culture, we sometimes need to remind ourselves that trees are our living relatives—very distant relatives, but nonetheless fellow beings with whom we share not only history but genes, DNA, and fundamental life experiences. Like us, they are born, they live, and they die. They breathe in and out, they have circulations, they suffer injuries and sicknesses, they have sex lives and offspring, they respond to light and dark and cold and heat and hunger and thirst. They are both individuals and part of communities. If we have the feeling, when we enter a woods or forest, that we are at home, it’s because, in some deep and calming way, we are. We are reentering our ancestral home, surrounded by distant, beneficent kin who are quietly tending and nourishing the world.
All the best,
Tony
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