Be more tree than anything else.

aspens, Bear, & caves

“I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.”

— from “Bright Dead Things” by Ada Limón, U.S. Poet Laureate

I notice the way golden leaves float in spirals to the ground, heavier than when they were younger leaves who quaked and shimmied in the canopy all summer long. The evergreens are hunkering down and the chill is biting back at the wide blue sky. Sunlight glistens through every leaf.

I’m trying to remember the essence of connection and belonging. I’m looking for a way to embody change and integrate with the land. I’m searching for something like forest church.

I find it in the aspen, which connects me to the season and myself and the collective.

One aspen tree is only a small part of a larger organism. A stand or group of aspen trees is considered a singular organism with the main life force underground in an elaborate, extensive root system.

In a single stand, each tree is a genetic replica of the others, so they’re technically clones both in origin and life. This is what allows a stand to collectively turn a stunning, highlighter yellow all at once.

Before a single aspen trunk appears above the surface, the root system lies dormant for many years until the conditions are just right for growth. Then they burst forth all at once. They are able to quickly colonize recently burned areas to establish a stand of young trees.

The aspen trees are resilient because they are interdependent. What they need most beyond what they can provide themselves is simply abundant sunshine.

What I go to the aspens to do is not something I can remotely call leaf peeping. It's more sacred, more sacramental. It's ritual and ceremony. I go see the leaves to put myself in the way of reverence and awe. I touch their white bark, smooth and soft and scarred like an elephant rump. I stare straight into their knotty eyes and wonder what all they've seen. They don't have mouths so I have to listen harder – trees use language in other ways.

The tangible lessons from forest church is that there's beauty and bravery in death. It's necessary to surrender to cycles. It's okay to have a fallow season and it’s okay when being resilient is hard, too. Some journeys are still in progress.

I need these reminders as we dig out of a historic snowstorm and the branches are suddenly bare and the time has changed to make darkness more dark than necessary.

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The Winter Solstice Bear¹ had sat on my desk mocking me all year long. I drew it after my dog Prudence died and I’d just returned from Palestinian refugee camps and I didn’t know what to do with my grief as the aspens lost their leaves and snow fell so I put it in a book about something else entirely. I hibernated and went inward to finish the first draft of my memoir manuscript, and in May sent it off to a few trusted friends and readers.

Before I went to Spain for three week this October, I put that card back in the oracle deck. I intended to have moved on by the time I got home. I planned on travel and time away from work and home to re-awaken me from the long slumber of book writing and grieving and a Summer of Surrender I can’t begin to unpack with you yet. But I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d still have so much more to learn about embracing change and healing in ways that don’t involve purely moving or travel or leaving, as someone so prone to wander.

When I got home to Colorado, I sought guidance to navigate re-entry. The aspens had already made their last huge, collective exhale of brilliance and oxygen and vibrance. They were already gone. So I sat down at my desk and I drew a new card.

I hold the card in disbelief.

I could have picked again, picked my own meaning, but I know better.

It’s not magic, it’s a mirror.

I don’t even have to look it up in the reference booklet.

The Bear has found me again.

And I don’t want The Bear.

I don’t want to have to embody the lessons of the aspens and the courage of the bear in fall. I don’t want the vulnerability of trusting co-creation. I am afraid of what I’ll find when I quiet the noise to hear my own voice again.

Trying to stay human right now feels like a million yellow aspens living, breathing, dying together. Unbearable beauty and unavoidable pain. When politics and international law and borders and diagnoses and loss and dehumanization and genocide don’t make sense, nature carries on. The aspen keeps throwing yellow and springing back green, no matter if we witness it or not. The bear wakes up and wanders out into the sunshine in search of sustenance for the next season, and creation provides.

When I slow down to listen for what I might need to feel resourced, I hear my body and soul craving deep, deep rootedness. While there are stories begging to make their way out of me, and grief and burnout to be metabolized, and solidarity to be embodied, there are the fleshly yearnings of long naps and paint on my fingertips and lingering meals and long walks to be treasured through this season of darkness.

There are, for me, equal parts relief and anguish in this undeniable call just to let the savage grass grow.

I am trying to accept that I must prepare to hibernate through this dark winter. How do I do this well when I already resisted it for so long? What does it look like to fully surrender to the cycle? How can I give myself permission to hibernate from the internet when capitalism says I should be hoarding resources, and storing up wealth, and looking after only my own, and devaluing my creativity simply because the institutions are built on scarcity, not abundance? How do I keep from sinking into the pit of despair while prioritizing solitude and in-person community? How can I wrestle with my privilege in a time such as this to take a break? How can I do no harm while I try to be rest and reset instead of do rest as relentless activity without progress toward a different reality?

I have seen and experienced so much decay in the past year and I’m angry and grieving and exhausted, like anyone else who’s been paying attention. AND I’m personally unscathed by genocide or federal politics. I have White privilege, live in the democratic island state of Colorado where women’s reproductive rights are protected, have a US passport and citizenship, and am able-bodied, housed, college educated, married to a man, self-employed, relatively insured, and so am able to pay or avoid most harm by far more than the skin of my Invisalign-ed teeth.

Still, I’m exhausted and disheartened and scared.

I’m also disconnected from myself which makes me disconnected from everyone else. I’m having a hard time orienting some things in my life that need my attention.

I need to spend some time regulating my nervous system and learn how to better do this alongside witnessing the horrors of Palestinian genocide, another Trump presidency, and the stripping of rights from people I know and love in real life, not merely in theory, and untangling my own discomfort with learned helplessness.

While some people will be taking a four-year hiatus to let y’all work on social justice while they nap, or peace out on genocide, leaving it to TPTB because they’ve seen enough and said enough and done enough and had enough, that’s not me. I’m here, trying new ways of engaging work and rest for the benefit of our collective humanity. Voting every day for the world I want to live in.

I want to become responsible again (or response-able as adrienne maree brown calls it.)

I’m pausing thinking out loud and in public for a bit and I’ll be back when it’s time. In this season, you may see even less of me online. My weekly cadence of newsletter publishing is long gone, but I may continue to pop in here once a month or so when I have something worth sharing. I plan to abstain from posting or scrolling social media for a while, and already deleted the Facebook and Instagram apps from my phone. I’ve been banned from using and posting on Instagram twice before, so it’s only a matter of time before it happens again and I honestly don’t care anymore. But my consumption isn’t helping either. I have unsubscribed to many, many things and voices in order to center the marginalized and hear my thoughts own again.

I am going to go easy on myself when I’ve made promises I can’t keep. I am going to reframe my rest and recovery as service to the collective. I am but one small part of the larger organism, the stand. Like the aspen, I will be strong and I will be soft in this hibernation. I trust I will know when my time in the cave is complete, and when The Bear can find her way home.

If you need permission to go into the cave for hibernation, for honoring the season, for healing and reclaiming some of what this year has consumed of you and us, please take this gentle invitation to go find some bear medicine for yourself.

I have hope in what can be born in the dark from light, that abundant sunshine will come again. But for now, watch the trees and the bear who never ask how to stay alive through winter because they know surrender and embodying evolutionary cycles is the way to truly survive and thrive together.

Until next time,

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1. Asha Frost’s Sacred Medicine Oracle Deck