Why I'm Thinking About Trees This Morning

A dark morning

It is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies; yet our present numbers are sufficient to repel the force of all the world. ~Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)

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It is a dark morning, friend. And here I am, with my coffee. Thinking about redwoods and you and the future.

Have you ever seen a redwood tree? They're majestic and towering - scraping the sky while standing shoulder to shoulder with fellow redwoods in what feels like impossibly close quarters.

They can become so tall that their circulatory system can't pump water to the whole tree, so their upper needles have adapted to drink fog right out of the sky.

You'd think that anything that can grow that tall would have roots penetrating deep into the earth, wouldn't you? Something so tall, so heavy, so vulnerable to the wind and the weather must counterbalance its height with roots as long as it is tall, right?

Nope.

The roots of these trees - which can grow higher than a 30 floor skyscraper - rarely grow more than 12 feet underground. Instead, they spread out laterally - extending over 100 feet from the tree.

And that's where the secret of their stability lies.

They interlock.

Each tree's roots interconnect with the roots of neighboring redwoods; those trees hold hands with their neighbors, and so on and so on, such that each tree is connected, one with the other throughout the forest.

In our Darwinist dogwood-eat-dogwood worldview, we look at a forest and assume the trees are trying to one-up each other; each is vying for light and air and water, after all - which are valuable resources that diminish with each new member. It stands to reason that the trees would block each other, ensuring they get the most and the best of what nature has to offer.

But rather than competing, they're connecting.

No one tree ever truly stands alone.

So when the forest floor floods, the mat of roots they have created secures both the strongest and the weakest and keeps all of them solid. And when the gusts of wind come that would otherwise rip a tree from its bed, its neighbors steady its base and keep it grounded.

Standing alone they are powerful, majestic, strong. But together? Well. Together they're invincible.

One might even say they're indivisible.

So much the same for us, friend.

There will be days when it feels like the winds are so fierce and so violent that any one of us would be toppled. There will be days when the flood is so deep and the water so murky that any one of us would be drowned. And there will be days when we think we just can’t keep standing.

It’s on those days when our greatest strength, our unity, will carry us on.

So, friend.

Let’s hold hands.

Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash