I’m feeling heavy today. Tearing up while listening to my audiobook (which, to be fair, is Braiding Sweetgrass, so I’ll probably also have tears on days that I’m feeling less leaden because Robin Wall Kimmerer is saying v. important stuff). I’m having trouble being “productive” or tackling anything on my to-do list. My lower back hurts and I am groggy. My legs are achy, yet I can think of no explanation.
I’ll say this early here so you don't feel hoodwinked by this post: it’s personal and a bit cloudier than usual. There’s some sunlight too…but not the typical weather.
Tl;dr
If you’re in a hurry or feeling overwhelmed by all.the.things right now, please don’t let this add to your burden. I’m writing today to process, not to prove. That’s all.
Sleepless
Last night I lay in bed with Clara, my “five-and-three-quarters”-year-old, as she had nightmares. I don’t know what they were about but she whimpered and I could feel her emotion coursing through me. Her unease twinged the thread connecting us – the same felt sense that means my own mom – to this day – knows when I have my period even when I’m thousands of miles away on a different continent.
Clara’s fitful sleep remarkably passed to her 3.5 year-old sister, Nora, who Eric and I affectionately-but-never-to-her-face call “Snore-a” for her deep, log-cutting slumber. Even in the peaceful depths of Nora’s rest, she cried out in a sisterly sympathy dream that I think was actually empathy.
I could easily blame my malaise and sadness today on a poor night’s sleep or on mom-worry.
But I know today’s melancholy has deeper roots unearthed by exhaustion’s erosion.
Tree-person
Yesterday while on a walk in my neighborhood with a friend, we passed by a tree-person1 who had been cut down. Murdered. Only a short while had passed before we came upon her, as sawdust – not yet carried away by a breeze – still covered the rounds of severed limbs and body.
Were this tree-person still standing, I could not have wrapped my arms around her body. I’m only 5’2” tall, so maybe that’s not saying much. I suspect even a taller person with a bigger wingspan would have had trouble enveloping her fullness.
Tree-people have been falling all over Nairobi lately with heavy rains landing on already saturated ground. They are rotting and breaking – or their roots are planted in soil softened too much to hold them. Big tree-people have fallen.
This one didn’t fall though. That was obvious just looking at her remains and the strong trunk stub that stood rooted where she was growing for decades or more.
The Giving Tree
After a deep breath of sadness and a wave of nausea (you will see why – or maybe you already know), I thought about Shel Silverstein’s book The Giving Tree, which I still can’t read without my voice catching – either out loud or in my head. At least in this tree’s death, I thought, she might get some joy by providing seats upon which little learners could rest while listening to a story read aloud by their teacher and hearing the birds’ chirps, the wind’s rustling of leaves. Just like the Giving Tree, I pictured her stumps straightening themselves up and assuming their new purpose supporting little learners.
I reached out to our neighborhood WhatsApp group to inquire about whether her beautiful wood might be used for tree stump seating at a local school trying to do outdoor nature-based learning.
No.
They told me.
This tree seeps a lot of gum-like liquid and is not good for making seats or furniture.
What type of tree was she?
I asked.
No one knew.
And though I didn’t ask directly, my elephant-sized why was perceived through the tone-deafness of a group text message.
Her branches were leaning on a transformer.
Her offense apparently invoked the death penalty rather than simple pruning or moving the transformer. By the time I walked by, I was too late. It was too late.
…
Before I sent that message about tree-stump seating, I knew it wasn’t going to work. Not for this tree-person. She would not be reborn in an outdoor classroom.
It wouldn’t work because of her blood. Her severed limbs.
Her bleeding, broken heart.
Interspecies Empathy & Nature-based Learning
Clara was putting on her shoes to leave when a wasp crawled on the floor next to her foot. Several circled around the entrance to my friend’s house. There must have been a nest nearby.
In an instant (by instinct?) I grabbed my sandal and smashed the yellow jacket.
Clara’s body seized. She wailed.
She screamed. Sobbed.
Why?
she asked when I could finally make out her one word.
I was speechless and ashamed. Cowed by the volume of Clara’s cries and her visceral full-body response, shamed by my senseless act. I searched for a reason. I offered some rational — hollow — crap about how much yellow jacket stings hurt. About invasive species. About how they don’t belong in our homes.
Her embodied devastation endured. As we rode home – Clara on the back of “paci-bike,” named for the pacifier we used to clip to her bike seat when she was still a baby – the sobbing subsided and gave way to sniveling. Her breathing regulated.
Mine did not. It still has not.
It quickened when I saw her – my tree-sister – lying there bleeding – with me a bystander unable to help. Too late.
I believe she would still be alive if more adults were first kids who shared Clara’s emotional connection to more-than-human nature.
My daughter goes to a forest school where even the safari ant-people (whose bites are a bit less painful than a yellow jacket’s sting) are respected and students are reminded that we are in their home as much as the ant-people are in their classroom. Students and facilities managers use non-toxic powders to steer the safari ants in different directions from where students pass so both can coexist. I used to think this act – thoughtful treatment of safari ants – was such a small thing. Even quaint and “hippie-dippie.”
But it’s not. It is the thing. It’s why Clara felt so deeply when I killed that yellow-jacket.
Apple-a-day nature-based learning in schools – bringing learning outdoors or bringing elements of nature indoors for learning in modest, do-able ways – provides a foundational way we can ensure all kids have a baseline connection to nature and grow into adults who have this somewhere in their core.
It’s small. And it is the thing.
I know these nature connections in schools might not save the wasp-people – or the mosquito-people – but I believe it can save the tree-people.
I also believe foundational emotional connections with more-than-human nature will develop and hone interspecies empathy much like the sisterly empathy that woke Nora from her deep sleep when Clara had nightmares last night. Interspecies empathy will give way to a world where we know we are too connected to our decades old tree-person neighbor to cut her down in the name of expediency or convenience or whatever — a world where we see our place in a larger, interconnected, interdependent whole.
In the wake of my melancholy and with Clara still glassy-eyed from a poor night’s sleep, we planted some seeds. We collected them under a big tree-person two months ago – and are still trying to learn what type of tree-people might grow. Clara is nurturing them with her little watering can (I think it’s actually Nora’s, but she’ll share).
❤️,
Becca
PS - I wrote most of this on Monday – so Sunday was when I met my tree-sister too late and when Clara had nightmares. I’m feeling a little bit lighter today.
PPS - Still figuring out how some tree-people stumps can live again in outdoor classrooms.
See Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass - Learning the Grammar of Animacy - to understand that invocation of trees and all other life as beings — as people. I am forever changed by this linguistic weight which is makes so many things clearer to me even as I have so many questions.
A fine piece, Becca.