Listen Closely. Listen Deeply. Listen Carefully.
We have grown up in a place where beautiful, enormous ponderosa pine trees have been a backdrop of many of the places with which we are most familiar. In fact, Spokane, Washington is actually the place these great trees were first given their own unique name. On November 17, 2015 something that is not native to the rhythms of eastern Washington swept through Spokane. It was called an “inland hurricane” by meteorologists. 70-mile an hour winds toppled many of the enormous Ponderosas on the South Hill, the area where I live, sometimes crushing houses in their falls. High winds came again the next year, and people began talking about the Ponderosa’s “shallow root system,” which everyone deemed to be a liability with these trees. People began to cut them down left and right. The beautiful, old trees that once graced the skyline and provided shade to our houses became an object of fear. And, as it seems with many things we humans are afraid of, we decided the answer was to kill them.
It was so sad to see these trees fall. But, if this was going to be the new weather pattern in Spokane, it seemed that everyone felt change had to happen. Nevermind that humans had set all of these extreme weather patterns in motion. It didn’t seem fair the trees had to pay for it.
Fast forward through a pandemic and it’s the summer of 2023. We have a new puppy and two raccoons have decided to take up residence in a tall old spruce tree that was topped in the windstorm of 2015. The tree has a candelabra of small christmas trees on top, a perfect perch for a pair of raccoons. In our desperation to figure out how to address this problem, we invited our local energy company to come out and see if maybe with its proximity to power lines we could just have them prune away the Christmas village on top of the tree, thus making it less appealing to the raccoon couple.
And, in typical fashion of the universe, they sent a worker to look, but in reality, she turned out to be a real world Lorax–she was in love with the trees, and she most certainly spoke for them. The assessment we thought we would get was instead the most magical introduction to the trees we had lived with for the last decade. I felt like I met them for the first time. I found myself talking to them with her after each introduction. Something I do in private, but most certainly not with the Avista worker I have just met for the first time in my backyard. I learned so much about every incredible tree in our yard that day. The way they were working together, how happy they were, why they were growing in certain ways…and then I asked her about our enormous, enormous Ponderosa. She knew the question that was coming.
“Your Ponderosa is fine. People overwatering their yard was actually the problem,” she said. “Everyone blamed the Ponderosa’s shallow root system, but the trees that fell were in overwatered yards. The Ponderosa is a drought tree,” she explained. She went on to describe that Ponderosas actually have a very, very deep root, called a tap root, that usually makes them very stable in high wind. The tap root exists to draw water deep from the ground when there are years of drought. However, when the ponderosa is routinely overwatered, they abandon their tap root, and this is what destabilizes them.
“So,” she concluded, “don’t overwater your yard.”
This incredible fact completely upended my understanding of what I thought had been true, and it rippled through other perspectives I had forgotten to question in my passive acceptance that Ponderosas had shallow root systems and blew over easily in windstorms. In fact, they are not only incredibly stable, but also highly resilient in all weather.
I walked among the Spruce, the Fir, the Corkscrew Willow, the Hawthorne, the Catalpa, and the Ponderosa differently that day. We are the perceivers. But, we are also the perceived. What did they have to say about us? There had been a massacre of Ponderosas on the South Hill of Spokane. We blamed them. We deemed them a danger to us. We had been the ones that hadn’t cared for them. We were the danger to them. And part of our not caring for them was simply not paying attention.
As so many things with nature do when you pay attention, there was also a metaphor in the Ponderosa and the windstorm that came to me, and felt like a lesson to heed. When we overwater ourselves, we lose our stability and resilience to withstand even the harshest of times. How do we overwater ourselves and our world in ways that cause us to abandon the thing that brings us stability and sustenance in the dry times? How do we in our effort to “look good” actually lose our ability to live well? When we are so focused on protection of ourselves as potential prey, how do we actually become the predator?
When we look closer at everything, when we shift our vantage point, we begin to see with new eyes. There Nature is, teaching us a lesson, silently waiting for us to listen. Listen better. Listen deeper. Listen a little more carefully. How do we begin to see the mystery in ways that open our hearts to deeper knowing and wisdom hidden in plain sight? How can we, as humans, better ourselves, our communities, and our connection with the more-than-human world so we can take care of the beings and mother that sustains us and our continued existence?
That’s a lot of questions to sit with. To live with. Not in hopes of an answer, but in hopes of just simply learning to step down my path a little differently.
