Today, in twenty-first-century Western society, technology is at the forefront of most of our lives. This sees too many of us, far too many of us, spending our days watching the world go by through a screen, and therefore failing to differentiate between the virtual world and the real world.
Alas, technology separates us from nature, with the sense of there being something missing that all too many of us experience undoubtedly being because of this separation that we experience…
We have become separated from who and what we are at our core, like trees (a species that has existed for over a thousand times longer than ours)… Trees are not only everywhere, but they are also everything.
Operating via a vast underground network, trees communicate just like humans.
Trees are linked to neighbouring trees by an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in the brain. They perceive and respond to each other by emitting chemical signals via this network, therefore allowing the older trees to pass their knowledge onto the younger trees.
As ecologist Suzanne Simard discovered in one study, Douglas fir injured by insects sends chemical warning signals to ponderosa pine growing nearby. The pine trees then produce defence enzymes to protect against the insect.
The trees, as Simard, highlighted, were sharing ‘information that is important to the health of the whole forest.’
What’s more, in addition to warning each other of danger, Simard says that trees have also been known to share nutrients at critical times to keep each other healthy. Because kin recognition is present in forests, a dying tree will send more nutrients to its kin.
Such a process involved in the example above is magic, pure magic, yet separation, (owing to capitalism), forces us to focus on everything that is external to ourselves, like money…
Money makes us act in ways that are reckless towards nature, hence why we fell trees, as just one example of humanity’s crimes against the planet, to create land for houses that no one can afford…
Genesis 3: Adam and Eve sinned by eating the fruit from the tree ‘which I commanded you, you must not eat from it…’
Alas, it’s been 3400 years, and yet we still take and we take from that which is not ours to take from…
But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.
Fortunately, though, as nature is ‘pure magic’, we can log trees for generations, yet the seedlings will still take root. Why? Because everything is cyclical.
Everything comes from a seed, regenerates, and becomes whole again from the disconnected parts of its source…
In Suillus mushrooms (see the image above), another important occupant of the forest and ‘friend’ of trees, each oval-shaped opening houses minuscule stalks built to discharge spores. Spores are the ‘seeds’ of fungi and are packed full of DNA that binds, recombines, and mutates to produce genetic material. The spores will then become latched onto the legs of a flying insect, for example, or perhaps they will become the dinner of a squirrel. Who knows, for nature knows no greed…
Even when nature turns violent, the earth will always rebound and come to humanity’s rescue, despite humanity being the very thing that the earth needs rescuing FROM…
Something that does know greed, however, is the majority of the things that we do today. It is the greed for money and validation, for example, that has made social media so popular, because it gives us such validation…
On social media, we crave the thrill that goes hand-in-hand with the likes and comments that we receive. With each notification that lights up our phone, we relish in the satisfaction that is granted to our ego, all the while ignoring the fact that we are abandoning our soul, our soul which is rooted in Mother Nature herself…
If you cut yourself on the branch of a tree, is your blood in the trees, or are the trees in your blood?
Humanity and nature, we’re one and the same.
Nothing can ever replace that which exists in the world outside of the four walls of your house, or the four corners of your phone screen.
And so, to experience the magic that is nature for yourself, put down your phone, log off the apps, and please, for the lord of God (/Mother Nature: same difference), get outside.
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