Newsletter:20080823/Morris
From EcoReality
Baby Knees and Aspen Trees
On Human Nature and Green Nature
It’s been some many months now since she began to speak in a language that we could understand. Overjoyed and perhaps over zealous, we new parents took this as a sign that it was indeed time to teach our little one the popular labels of our culture. After mommy and daddy and the appellations of those humans closest to us, we branched out to the next closest corporal reality – body parts. And this is when my education began.
Yes I do know most of my own body parts and even those of others (I studied anatomy while learning massage therapy). It wasn’t even her rapid grasp of individual body parts that grabbed my adoring attention, rather it was her play on perception, her reality of relationship. Allow me to explain.
She easily learned eyes and ears, knees and nose, elbows and hands, head and toes. What intrigued me was her difficulty, perhaps resistance, to seeing her knees or her nose as separate from any others. When asked she could “correctly” point to mommy’s nose or daddy’s toes or her own elbow but often as not she would mix up whose nose was whose or which knee belonged to whose leg. So over and over we reinforced the distinction, the separation, clearly defining who owned what. And eventually she learned or ……acquiesced.
She now knows her nose and recognizes or accepts that it is separate from mine. We new parents were proud …. and saddened at what seems to be a necessary developmental learning stage.
As I daily observed the human nature of my daughter I was reminded of a recent learning in the world of green nature. This is the world to which I often turn to make meaning from my own experiences. It concerns my favourite form of Yukon gold, the trembling aspen, Populus tremuloides to use its botanically correct, widely accepted label. Exactly what does the aspen have to teach us about relationships? Plenty so it would seem.
According to naturalist Wayne Lynch this popular species of poplar is particularly prolific when it comes to propagation. Yes, like many trees they will send off seeds whose cottony wisps are carried on the wind, but more often than not they simply send out horizontal roots from which new trees grow vertically. This could explain why I’ve heard more than one person complain about trying to eradicate aspens from their backyards. Their common root system is actually a single organism, sharing a common set of genes. One particular grove in Utah was counted by researchers to contain 47,000 individual tree trunks. They believe it may be the heaviest and largest organism on the planet. There is credible speculation that the Yukon may also have a grove or two equally as large.
To me this is remarkable. For years my formal schooling in “Forest Engineering” taught that a forest is made up of individual and separate trees. This is not always true; in fact it may come to be soon widely accepted that trees in a forest are more like fingers on the same hand. Whether it is through the discovery of the connecting role of mycorrhizal fungi or of actual root connections, science continues to provide proof of what spirit has been saying for eons.
What often appears on the surface as separate, when I dig a little deeper, can be shown to be irrefutably similar if not the same. Perhaps there really is no separation at all. Perhaps my little girl already knows this. For her, my nose or her mum’s nose is her own nose. And maybe baby knees and aspen trees are made of the same stuff.
I imagine that this developmental learning stage of labeling and seeing as separate will soon lose its luster. I trust that our human world will not need much longer before we again perceive people and places, wild and domestic, as body parts of a whole being.
Maybe this is simply a necessary stage of forgetting in human be-ing. May I soon remember to once again see through the eyes of a child.
