Planting a Tree Is an Act of Faith

To plant a tree is…

1. To act. Planting a tree is not a question of believing in someone outside of your self. Nor is it a question of believing something about yourself, as sinner or saint, bound or free. Planting a tree is an action—a doing—where you initiate a sequence of movements that will have consequences. You move your bodily self in the world in a way that makes a difference to who you are, to how you feel, and to what is. You begin.

2. To imagine. In order to plant a tree, you need to be able to look clearly at what is, and see an alternate reality emerging alongside the one that already exists. You need to imagine that reality, thoughtfully, fully, knowing that one image is not more real than the other: the difference lies in how you act, in the movements you will make. What matters, what happens, is up to you.

3. To desire. To plant a tree, you can’t just form a picture of an alternative reality in your mind’s eye, you have to want it to be more real than what is. You have to feel a pull towards your own vision that guides your action in ways that will make that vision true. Without this desire, your imagining will not go anywhere, and your action will have nowhere to go.

4. To trust. To plant a tree is to trust that the world as we know it and need it will endure. It is to trust that the sun will shine but not too warmly; the rain will fall but not too heavily; that the soil will nourish, and the earth will turn. It is to trust that, in the fifty years it takes this tree to grow, we humans will get our act together enough to preserve a climate within which these trees—and human beings—can live.

5. To care. And when you set that seedling in the ground, and your human heart swells at its vulnerable, unlikely fate, you know: to plant a tree is to care. It is not just that you can imagine, want, and trust a new reality to emerge, you care about whether or not it does. You care about whether this tree, the one you are planting, becomes what it has the potential to be. That is, you care about this single tree—not just your vision. You care because you act, and your acting makes it so.

6. To commit. In that rousing of affection, as you realize how much you care, you find a willingness to commit yourself to the well being of the trees you are handling. You are willing to do what you must and what you can to let this tree and that tree live. You orient yourself to the trees, knowing that your fates are entwined.

7. To risk. At the same time, every step of the way, you are haunted by other possibilities you can imagine. Because you imagine and care and act, you walk in the shadow of your own fear and doubt. There is no guarantee that any one of these trees in your care will amount to anything. To plant a tree is to risk being undone by torrential rains, hungry deer, or careless cattle. It is to risk being dried in drought, fried in a heat wave, or buried by snow. It is to risk…failure. Disappointment. Despair. All of the time, energy, and resources you are spending could be for naught. Poof. Nothing there.

8. To honor. Although you act and care and stomach risk, in the end, you also know: there is nothing you can do make the tree grow. It is not in your power. No amount of imagining, desiring, or trusting can make it grow. For the tree to become what it is—what you can imagine it might be—there must be some un-nameable, unstoppable power manifest in the tree itself, searching to thrust its way into the world in this particular time, place, and shape. The tree must “want” to grow, to move into the world, to take in all the world has to offer, and transform what it receives into a space-spanning height and breadth. Planting a tree, you honor this life force. You honor it by enabling it—by participating in it and aligning your efforts, however small, with what you can imagine it to be. And you do so in awe of what may become real and true through you as you do.

9. To be a body. To plant a tree one must be a bodily self, and not just to hold a shovel. Bodily selves exist to move. It is their purpose. The benefits of accessing larger arcs of time and space drew singular organisms together to bond and differentiate their cellular selves. As a result, every limb and lobe, every organ and system of our bodily selves, represents a complex pattern of movement potentials that have been made and remembered and handed down over millions of years. Because our bodily selves have moved, we can imagine what will happen, care that it might, and want, trust, commit, risk, and act to make it so.

10. To affirm life. To plant a tree is to affirm life—to love it—all of it. It is to embrace the dirt clinging to your eyelashes; the rocks under your knees; the tight, bright fists of needle green, waiting to open. It is to affirm the weight of the wheel barrow mounded with mulch; the effort of digging deeply; the stress of surfing the unknown, and the incredible joy of being a body who can and does participate in a mutually enabling, reciprocally empowering unfolding of what is. Of what may be. Of beauty incarnate.