Why Do I Love Trees?

I am often asked what exactly it is about trees that draws me to them so strongly.  And I must confess: just as often as I am asked, I fail to have a good answer.  Truthfully, as my interest and fascination with trees began to really take hold of me and the trajectory of my life, I rarely if ever stopped to reflect on why. 

What was it about trees that captivated me?  What about them spurred such intense curiosity and wonder?  What kept me wanting more?  What caused such a compulsion within me to explore what a tree is, and which one is which, and how they work?  What kept bringing me back to them term after term in college, year after year, job after job?  What about them piqued my imagination so? 

To be frank, my answers to the seemingly simple and all too routine question, “What do you love so much about trees?” were made up on the spot.  I simply never considered the question until the moment it was asked, and at that moment I just needed an answer.  By the time this question was asked seriously to me, it was certainly clear that I held trees in a high regard and that I saw them in ways that went far beyond what most people in my culture would have considered normal.  So naturally, the curious individual would want to know why.

Ask a similar question of love of one’s subject to any number of professionals, and the answers I’m sure will vary as much as mine have, from vague to profound: I love trees so much because I just find them fascinating in every way.  Or I love trees so much because they inherently embody a pure and earnest sense of dignity and humility with an utter lack of hubris or arrogance.  I suppose both of these are right, in my case, and in fact I’ve said something similar to each of those answers when I’ve been questioned in the past.  However, and I am truly sorry to the askers of these questions because I honestly had not investigated those answers before I gave them.

I do blame myself, and regret giving unsupported answers to questions, but presently I feel I need to have a more considered answer for such a question.  Why do I do what I do?  I clearly like it, so what about it do it like?  Why, these questions aren’t hard.  The answers should be obvious, foundational even.  Yet here we are.

I suppose the best way to start would be with a bit of self-reflection.  After all, it is difficult to explain why you like something so much if you cannot really express who you are in the first place.  Perhaps this is at the core of why I’ve failed to really know why I love trees in the first place: I can’t really explain who I am to begin with, so the premise and fundamental assumptions of the question are flawed from the outset.  We must first mine the mind for its understanding of itself before we can extract conclusions regarding why it chooses to try to understand something else so intensely.

Perhaps then a good place to begin is by asking, “What do you love?” and, being thus illuminated, it will be clear to see whatever that is in the trees.   Or, maybe the reverse is true, and the investigation should focus on the trees and their attributes, and once narrowed down to those I find most compelling, the answer to the question of why will reveal itself (and in so doing have the convenient side effect of telling me about what else it is I love).  

The first option of the two, ironically, seems to be very mechanical and deterministic.  You are like this, therefore you will like these.  Though very likely not a wrong way to approach the quandary, it does not seem to allow for outliers, or for partial love, or gradients.  The question itself has grand optimism and endlessness in scope; however, it also implies a certain mustness: if you love this, then it must be present in that, post hoc ergo propter hoc.  It simply doesn’t seem that answering that question will necessarily lead to an answer to the original.  I love plenty of things, but one can hardly conclude that it is my finding those things in trees that has led to my being enamored with them.

So what of starting with the trees?  Could I not ruminate on all the higher and lower aspects and traits of trees and forests and compile my findings into a treatise on how those make me tick?  Surely this also would be helpful, but it again misses something.  Beginning with the trees idolizes them and assumes they themselves define what it is I love.  We find ourselves in the same place but from the opposite side: if you love these things, then they must be a definitive personification of your love, or at the least they characterize what it is you love.  Another fallacy to fall into.  One cannot reverse engineer their way to finding a base truth because it assumes the place you started from is not only a manifestation of that truth but is the manifestation of the truth.  In other words, correlation is not causation.

But it could be. If we started this contemplation from ‘what do you love,’ it could lead anywhere.  There’s not surety that it would certainly explain why trees make that list.  If we began from ‘what makes trees lovable,’ it does not necessarily reflect my values and explain the genesis of my curiosity because then surely I would love anything that also has those attributes.  Yet, alas, I do not. 

So where does this leave us?  To my mind this leads towards an intersection of the two thought processes.  Consider what I love generally, and consider what makes tree lovable, and where those lines of thinking intersect you will find our answer.  

However, it feels more accurate to described it less of two lines and more as a series of waves intersecting with one another and amplifying when they synchronize.  Like finding the resonant frequency between two things, they reinforce each other, transferring energy seamlessly and effortlessly.  One wave does not inform necessarily where the other comes from, but they clearly match when they come together.  This I think is where the answer to the question of “what is it about trees that you love so much?” lies.  

Of course, this still is by no means an answer, just a framework for how the answer can be conceptualized.  In fact, it muddies the water of what the answer could be because it immediately introduces a huge amount of complexity.  How can we figure out which waves, some emanating from the deepest depths of me and others from the complex construct of nature, intersect in just the right way to amplify themselves so extraordinarily in my psyche?  Turns out it’s actually a hard question for me.

Now this begs one ask am I simply looking too hard for something that is far more simple and obvious than I am making it out to be?  Perhaps my love for trees is an evolutionary relic from our days as forest dwelling primates and most everyone else has simply eaten the modern cultural blue pill and never given them a second thought.  Pair that with an exposure to modern science and we’re off to the races with a very curious obsession with these banal wooden organisms.  But this seems too pedestrian, it doesn’t account for the passion or emotion that drives and feeds the wonder.

My only conclusion must be that one cannot separate the question in these ways. It is not a simple calculation of which informed which.  I am led to believe that the answer cannot be boiled down to its constituent parts because each part is dependent on and affected by the other.  I found that my mind resonated with trees; the more I looked into them, the more I found I love them; the more I loved them, the more I found what resonated with me; the more I found what resonated with me, the more I found what I love.  Though this seems circular, it’s more of a spiral, never really connecting back to where it began.  In fact, a more apt expression would be a spiral that branches and reticulates as it grows with tangents forming their own spirals and reticulations that sometimes reconverge with one another and the main spiral.  You can trace all these back to the beginning easily enough, but you couldn’t predict from the beginning where it would all go and what forces would lead it there because they constantly interacted throughout. 

It's the challenge of conceptualizing these spirals and waves and positive feedbacks that cause my mind to get lost (and I’m sure yours, too).  So, then what is at the base after we trace all the spirals, branch by branch, down to their beginning?  What was it that resonated originally? 

I don’t know.  It feels like to answer this question is to mine deeper and deeper in my mind seeking some kind of point where it all starts from.  But the deeper and deeper I go, the more complex it becomes and the harder it is to elucidate a specific causal agent, much less a specific moment in time when it became clear.  All the conclusions seem to lead back to one another or to some higher idea of what it means to be human, which at the end of the day doesn’t really carry much weight as an answer: I love trees because I’m a human, and that’s just what I do.  But maybe that’s the only answer we can really get down to without tracing each individual wave to its starting point and observing how it interacts with the waves around it. 

I suppose I’ll simply have to live with it: I love trees because.

These are some leaning noble firs (Abies procera) from near Mt St. Helens, WA. Clearly lovable trees