Resilience

There is an American Beech tree that I met around 20 years ago, which is now a fifteen-foot-tall snag.

They were tall and straight, with gloriously smooth bark.  I spent many moments standing under it and looking up, imagining ship masts and ancient forests.

I don’t know when they became infected with beech bark disease, but trees can take up to 20 years to die from the infection.  It’s possible this beautiful tree had been fighting an underlying disease as long as I knew it.

Tree species and forests worldwide are dying and falling prey to various threats, including insects, infections, diseases, and infestations. 

It’s a ridiculously complex set of issues, but for the most part, it can all be laid at our feet.  Climate change, the spread of invasive species by humans, purposeful deforestation, and even selective logging all create conditions that increase the threat and decrease the trees’ resilience against what they have mostly been able to defend against.

One of the scathing arguments that people make about trauma and humans who express trauma patterns is, “Things like this have always happened. Why are these people so fragile that they are affected now?”

I suggest it is the same thing.

We live in a time/culture/society with increased threats and decreased resilience. 

We don’t have other strong elder trees to support and nurture us, helping us learn how to handle the changing conditions.  Instead, the elders are either gone, separated, or just as undermined as we are.

We were forced to grow so rapidly that our wood is not as dense and strong as that of our ancestors.

The ground we hope to root deeply in is depleted, packed hard by machinery, and devoid of the microbial and fungal allies upon whom we depend for information and nourishment.

The conditions for which our ancestors prepared us are no longer the conditions we find ourselves in. 

And there really are novel stressors that have come upon us so fast that we haven’t a hope of adapting to them.

Is it any wonder that we and the trees are struggling?

I refuse to discount anyone’s stress and trauma for these reasons. 

Just like the trees, too, we can hide this kind of profound undermining of our structural integrity for years, decades… but it eventually shows on the outside. 

I work with a lot of people with this kind of trauma.  The kind that builds so slowly under the surface that we often don’t notice it in our own bodies until “all of a sudden” we are laid out in one way or another.

A sudden wind, a heavy snowfall, saturation of the ground we root in, or a crystal clear, sunny day could be all it takes to fell us.

This beech fell about seven or eight years ago.  I mourned it, and still do.  Wishing that this lone human could do more to change the course of history and the future.

I can, and do, help individual humans with their structural integrity, though.  Once we finally realize we are operating with a rotten core, we can reach out and get support to learn how to stand tall and strong in a new way.