My work is rewarding but oftentimes, hectic. My home is a sanctuary and also, a disaster zone. Have I perfected work-life balance? Absolutely not. Occasionally I remember to take a break from the deadlines and the dirty dishes by going outside, weather permitting, and sitting under a tree in my backyard.
Call it a quiet act of resistance.
As two tiny squirrels with twitching tails chase each other on the branches overhead, I shut my eyes, feeling the warmth of the sun and the coolness of a breeze on my cheek, and listen. A car drives too fast down the street, a motorcycle roars around the bend. A neighbor jackhammers, a crow caws seemingly in response. The trill of a spotted towhee and the staccato chirps of what I think is a chestnut chickadee.
It’s clear these hills are alive with the sound of music, hosted and absorbed by a forest of stalwart trees.
We’re lucky to live amid a wealth of trees in the East Bay, including multiple species of native oaks. According to an East Bay Regional Park District brochure, “Local Ohlone and Bay Miwok peoples used specialized horticultural methods to increase the biodiversity of oak woodlands.” In fact, the tree under which I sit is a coast live oak. There are many of them in my area, which form a kind of squirrel superhighway.
In California, Arbor Day is March 7, in honor of famed horticulturalist and botanist Luther Burbank’s birthday. I happen to be reading a book by another botanist—Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a scientist, educator and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
Noting Arbor Day’s proximity to tax season, Kimmerer makes a case for the often-overlooked civic contributions made by trees: as habitats for songbirds, wildlife cover, aiding air purification and sound absorption, providing shade for weary humans, and more. And yet their community services “go unaccounted for in the human economy,” she notes.
Early on in the book Kimmerer writes, “One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence.”
You know where I’ll be.
