My plan for the upcoming hot weather days is to hug as many trees as possible, walk barefoot on the green grass, re-connect, cleanse and destress. Well that's always the plan after a few overwhelming weeks spent in lockdown. Or maybe get in touch with my family members, old relatives. These weeks I've been wanting to get back to the roots, which now has become my space to look for answers, draw strength and courage from. Very inevitably, I always associate the roots of the trees with the connection that family members share.
Roots and trees in general fascinate me and has been the best vitamin for my restless nerves. It wouldn't be wrong to say that my inner child is a very hippie character, thanks to how I was raised, from the early days, being surrounded by the innumerable quantities and a vast diversity of trees, being taught by my grandparents of the old baltic notions and stories that elaborated the existence and beauty of different plants, also the the magics they could do to our wellbeing and the language they communicated. I am fascinated by the fact that trees are full of energy and that our connection to these gems of life is irreplaceable. Just give a second to think that tree branches look like our lung branches, and what I really romanticise, is the infinite inter-change of oxygen and carbon dioxide that emphasises mutual dependence between human beings, animals and nature.
If I feel like I need to re-charge, stabilise, strengthen my grounding and support on this earth, there's nothing better than taking a look at their roots spreading out of the earth, strong and supportive, gives me an idea of the strong bonds and inter-reliance that our society could learn something from.
Have you ever heard about the Redwood trees? Whose roots are not ingrown deep but rather across and wide throughout the earth, intertwining with one another. Besides giving support to one another against the forces of nature, the roots really serve as a portal for the trees to exchange their nutritions. The study shows that they share their nutritions, and when a tree dies and decays, the nutritions it has collected over ages, are released back into the other redwood trees through its roots, to nurture the relatives and bring the new sprouts up. Interdependence being the core principle of their existence and the central element of the "organisational culture" is something we humans could pay attention to.
And there's another interesting story that my sis Eva found in one of her books. There's this tree called Acacia that, in 1980, killed a big population of Antelopes who were feeding off their foliage. It took couple of years for biologists to find out what happened there. Before the drastic and sudden increase in the number of antelopes, the trees weren't reacting in any way as they knew the predators would usually eat a certain amount of leaves and leave. But due to the dramatic growth in the number of the antelopes in the reserve, the Acacias were put in danger.. As an answer to that, the threatened Acacias started emitting poison in their leaves. The same food for the antelopes that was edible then, became a lethal poison. Interestingly, the other Acacia trees outside the reserve also started doing the same thing, even though they had no contact with the predator. It's so powerful how these trees could exchange their chemical information to inform the relatives about danger.
