Criticism

Michel de Montaigne’s essay “On Habit” explores the nature of habit and overwhelm. Contemporary life feels designed to keep us in a state of near-constant overwhelm. I have a pile of books I’d like to read that I could stack literally from the floor to the ceiling. There are birthdays to remember and birthdays I’ve missed, but my love is strong, and I’m trying my best. There are work deadlines. There are projects to complete and emails to answer. There are fans to turn on because today is so damn hot. And then there’s climate change. The Toronto Star reports that Vancouver’s extreme heat is causing mussels, clams, and snails to “cook to death in their shells.” There’s impending drought in California. In Oregon a river runs dry while a fish species sacred to an entire tribe dies en masse, drowned by air. I’d go for a walk on the beach in Waikiki, but at high tide, half the beach is gone. I’d choose solipsistic solutions, but my cell phone is a ticking time bomb of overwhelm. How many inspirational quotes can I read in one hour on Instagram? How many aspirational lifestyles can I imagine trying to lead?

To add insult to the inundation is the fact that there’s a whole library of self-help books out there to overwhelm you with quick fixes to help you feel less overwhelmed. Popular articles offer a range of simple and banal solutions. For example, Inc. magazine lists exercise, deep breathing, gratitude practice, meditation, napping, drinking water, phoning a friend, asking for help, and (this was my favorite) downright procrastination (which can be achieved either by performing deep cleans of one’s desk or by blowing off one’s obligations entirely by going to the movies). I’ve tried all of these recently except going to the movies because every movie seems to be derived from some Marvel comic or another. Do people not write scripts anymore?

Being a seeker of non-banal solutions, I decided to see what Michel de Montaigne had to offer on the subject. Montaigne, for those who do not know, basically invented the personal essay. So, if you happen to be a teenager or young adult overwhelmed because there is a college essay due, you can blame Montaigne. Given that Montaigne is the cause of so much overwhelm, I thought it appropriate that I’d search within his thousand-plus page tome for a solution. I was not disappointed.

To Montaigne, the solution to overwhelm is habit and the source of the problem is also habit, “a violent and treacherous schoolteacher.” Habit is only as good as the quality and intention of one’s habits and so habit performed without intention leads us down the thorny and wide path to overwhelm. “Gradually and stealthily she slides her authoritative foot into us; then, having by this gentle and humble beginning planted it firmly within us, helped by time she later discloses an angry and tyrannous countenance, against which we are no longer allowed to lift up our eyes.” This should be the first quote presented to every person about to embark on the terrible habit of scrolling through Instagram.

In “On Habit,” Montaigne writes about the king who made it a habit to “draw nourishment from poison” and the woman who grew accustomed to survive by eating spiders. By this he means that we have many strange habits of which we are not aware, and that the human spirit, body, and mind can become habituated to almost anything. Montaigne notes: “Our judgement’s power is lulled to sleep once we grow accustomed to anything.” I live in Hawai’i, where it is all too easy to become habituated to beauty, and so I often stand at the corner of Ka’iulani and Kalakaua just to hear the tourists coo about the houses glowing down the mountains of Manoa like lava flow, like something one would expect to see on the Amalfi Coast.

Either way, there are habits formed in daily life and in childhood of which we may not be aware, that form the foundation of our moral dysregulation, not to mention, mental dysregulation. I’d argue that materialism and excessive consumption is one such habit on which we have all been nursed since we were children (I think of all the weekend trips I took with my mother to the mall). I was also fed Coca-Cola in my baby bottle, which led to a soda and sugar habit. Mere repitition and parental introduction does not make something in itself, right. It might be wise to step back and think about the source of our overwhelm: whether it is to climb the burning ladders of fame, accumulate an increase in social media followers, amass wealth, or accomplish other forms of excess. Sometimes the overwhelm is a symptom of our unequal society, one which glorifies billionaires who construct rockets (blatant vainglorious dick-measuring), while the planet burns, people starve, and millions in America live paycheck to paycheck, in fear of losing their jobs.

And yet, #overwhelmed and you’ll find a swarm of banal solutions and scripts to help you say “no.” Prayer and meditation are often presented as options, but one can neither pray nor meditate on a day where the temperature reaches 116 degrees without fear of heatstroke, nor sit on a beach fouled by the stench of mussels cooking in their own shells, nor swim in an ocean where the jellyfish and corals are literally being boiled alive without risking being boiled alive oneself. And those are the lucky ones. Try taking time to meditate while working two jobs and raising children. Montaigne doesn’t think much of the habit of religion anyway, noting that he will not delve too deeply into the “deceit of religions, which, as we can see, has intoxicated so many great nations and so many learned men.”

Habit can build us up or kill us. Montaigne spends a good portion of his essay “On Habit” listing the many strange habits of cultures and peoples. It’s a thrilling smorgasbord to which I’d add: Americans throw fire in the air, blow up a few children, and terrify their animals on the Fourth of July to celebrate freedom. Montaigne himself wrote: “In the past, when Cretans wished to curse someone, they prayed the gods to make him catch a bad habit.”

Habit can seem ordinary to a culture, or feel almost ordained by nature. Montaigne is such a rigorous thinker as to question the source of all his habits and his culture’s customs.

But Montaigne falls short of calling for outright revolution, even in the face of custom and habit’s absurdity. Here is where I have to disagree. “I abhor novelty,” he writes, saying that “innovators do most harm” particularly those who have so much “self-love and arrogance in judging so highly” of their own “opinions” that they are “obliged to disturb the public peace in order to establish them.” Montaigne was a comfortable man with leisure to read and time to question the very precepts on which his society was based. The billionaires building rockets surely must think the current system a fair one, blasting them to the stars on unpaid tax dollars while children starve, disease rages, drought drains our rivers, and gamblers declare bankruptcy while student loan holders rarely receive such forgiveness. But while the Amazon deliveries always arrive on time, what happens to the Amazon’s actual trees is another story.

Revolution would certainly disturb Montaigne’s comfort (and also the comfort of so many still benefitting from the current arrangement), and so his calls to uphold common laws and to justify those laws on the basis of religion are so loaded with contradictions and bias that they cannot be taken seriously. Wasn’t he just earlier criticizing the folly of religion to provide a justification for all types of stupidity?

He is right to note that the best intentions carry unintended consequences, and we are wise to consider these consequences before we go grab our pitchforks. But, after careful consideration, with the planet burning, it may be time to grab the pitchforks to stoke the flames of change. For those thinking of setting new habits, maybe the first habit should be a rigorous questioning of all current habits.

Perhaps the strongest case Montaigne makes is the case that we each question our own habits, our own fashions, and our own customs, within reason. So many of the habits of overwork and material consumption are the same habits responsible for the planet’s desecration. If we all slowed down a little more, we could do much to assuage the overwhelm and perhaps heal the planet. Perhaps when we are overwhelmed, we would be wise to look first at all the small and large habits of consumption, distraction, and foolishness that got us there in the first place.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

We needed Thich Nhat Hanh’s Love Letter to the Earth. We needed it more than we knew.

It was not Mordor. It was the Gulf of Mexico. Major news sources referred to it as an “eye of fire.” Not even Homer had imagined Charybdis being this terrible. The whirlpool of flame spiraled in the turquoise sea. Hoses dumped water on water that had turned to fire. The whole thing felt like a cosmic joke. It looked like hell itself. Actually, no, it didn’t. Not even Dante Alighieri could have imagined a hell like this. Either way, Dante imagined his hell as frozen. The fact that the burning water came to me mediated through a grainy video shot on a helicopter in the middle of the Gulf did nothing to blunt the horror. Is the essence of Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” at all muted because one cannot see the brushstrokes? Atrocious realities and fathomless feats of imagination withstand the distortions of mediation well. The fire burned in the Gulf, but it wasn’t the first time something like this has happened. Just over ten years ago, for 87 days, I watched the live online video of the Deepwater Horizon pipe vomiting oil into the Gulf of Mexico from my apartment in Canada, where I was living at the time. When all was said and done, over 4 million gallons of oil ended up in the Gulf, and the Environmental Protection Agency called it the “largest spill of oil in the history of marine oil drilling operations.” Years after the spill, dolphins and other marine animals were still dying at record rates. These are only minor tragedies when we think of the more immense challenges facing the planet today due to climate change, but I write about these oil spills because they offer such a stark visual record of the tragedies unfolding, and because they are a clear reminder that in 10 years since the worst oil spill in the history of marine oil drilling, nothing at all has changed. It is easy to feel hopeless. But Thich Nhat Hanh in his exquisite book, Love Letter to the Earth, offers hope through his mindful reminder of the planet’s resilience. This is not to release us from responsibility, but to remind us that each mindful act of conservation and restoration matters even as the Earth burns.

Imagine the Buddha sitting by the Bodhi tree, barely breathing, in perfect peace. Now, imagine people passing by, marveling at the sight. Day after day, crowds of people pass him by. Some, while passing, throw down their trash. Others pass in automobiles. Some are leaking oil. The trash piles up. One day, a man passes, lights a cigarette, and drops the match, lighting the Buddha on fire. He didn’t mean to.

Hanh considers the earth a bodhisattva, “a living being who has happiness, awakening, understanding, and love.” To Hanh, the earth is “an inexhaustible source of creativity” that nevertheless endures the mortifications of industrialization and climate change with “equanimity.” I fear that Earth’s equanimity won’t last for long. Already, we are starting to feel the tremors of her anger—in California and in Oregon’s wildfires and droughts, in the dead coral reefs, in rising seas, in stronger storms.

And yet, Hanh believes in the power of transformation: “We can throw fragrant flowers on the Earth; we can also throw urine or excrement on the Earth, and the Earth doesn’t discriminate. She accepts everything, whether pure or impure, and transforms it, no matter how long it takes.”

It is this faith in transformation that grounds Hanh’s faith in humanity. He believes that we can take refuge in the Earth to heal ourselves, and that in doing so, we can become mindful of our interconnection with the Earth, and heal the Earth in the process.

Healing ourselves means reframing our relationship to ourselves through mindfulness, but it also involves reframing how we consume.

Consumption is not without a moral imperative. How we choose to spend our time and money has an impact on the planet. This goes beyond choosing to drive electric vehicles or buying carbon offsets. This affects everything we consume, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat. Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University writes in his stunning collection of essays Ethics in the Real World, “Consumers have an ethical responsibility to be aware of how their food is produced, and the big brands have a corresponding obligation to be more transparent about their suppliers, so that their customers can make informed choices about what they are eating.” Could mindful choices really save the planet? Could all of us together, making mindful demands of ourselves, each other, and the companies that supply us our necessities change the planet?

Perhaps Hanh is up to something, particularly when I consider my time a finite resource that has the capacity to better or worsen the planet. Time is the one thing we have that is a non-renewable resource. How we spend our time is perhaps as important as how we spend our money. The choice to stay home and meditate rather than to drive somewhere. The decision to create art rather than to buy new things. The choice to go outside and hike instead of going to the mall. These are small things, but they matter.

Hanh writes: “Many of us are lost. We work too hard, our lives are too busy; we lose ourselves in consumption and distraction of all kinds and have become increasingly lost, lonely, or sick. Many of us live very isolated lives. We’re no longer in touch with ourselves, our family, our ancestors, the Earth, or the wonders of life around us.” We try to fill the void with consumption, “Yet our addiction to consumerism, to buying and consuming things we don’t need, is causing so much stress, so much suffering, both to ourselves, and to the Earth. Our craving for fame, wealth, and power is insatiable, and this puts a heavy strain on our own bodies and on the planet.”

To be lost is to be alive. The journey out through the lostness is life itself.

To Hanh “There is no difference between healing ourselves and healing the Earth.”

Perhaps Hanh is right. What would happen if everyone, all at once, gained mindful clarity about what needed to be done? What if the world’s greed were reduced? If we were all no longer alienated from ourselves, from each other, and from the planet, could the Earth heal?

Hanh writes, “Allow yourself to be yourself…healing will take place on its own.”

What a radical thing it would be—if we all found peace in doing nothing, if we all learned at last, how to be ourselves on this fragile planet. Perhaps less doing, and more thinking is in order.

Love Letter to the Earth by Thich Nhat Hanh at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

Love Letter to the Earth by Thich Nhat Hanh at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Living in the present is perhaps the most difficult task we have as humans on this planet. Exhausted by the memories of the past and terrified by the prospect of a future on a dying planet, I have found myself in recent days and weeks unable to sit still, inhabiting the present moment uncomfortably, if at all. Yes, even living in Hawai’i, one’s patience for rainbows, perfect blue oceans, and endlessly perfect waves, inevitably grows thin, and one eventually finds oneself retreating once again to that cramped and anxious hallway within. It has been the work of the Vietnamese poet, Zen master, and peacemaker, Thich Nhat Hanh to help his readers and followers learn how to better inhabit the present moment. But when I sat down to listen to one of his guided meditations yesterday, I had my doubts about whether he would be able to help me.

We have no need to invent a time machine to take us to the past or propel us into one of the multiverse’s possible futures. The imagination does that job just fine. I hardly sit down for a minute and already my mind travels to other continents. This week Portland, Oregon was as hot as Death Valley, and it doesn’t take perverse or even vast imaginative leaps to imagine every river and lake boiled dry while the ancient forests burn away around them. Portland reached 116 degrees last week. Water boils at 212 degrees, and at even lower temperatures than that at higher altitudes. My parents live there. My brother considered staging an air conditioner intervention for my parents.

Then there are more local issues to worry about. Where I live in Honolulu, Hawai’i, all signs indicate that the city is more likely than not to move forward with a project that involves dumping sand on a coral reef to create an artificial beach in front of one of the hotels. When I say I have been unable to sit still, I mean to say that I have been unable to do something as simple as exhale and inhale.

In Peace is Every Breath, Hanh writes that by reminding ourselves to return to the present moment when meditating, we can break ourselves of the habit of looking to the future where we believe we will finally have met all our “conditions of happiness”, and free ourselves from the prison of the past where we exist in a state of perpetual mourning or regret, haunted by blockages that don’t exist in the here and now. Hanh explains: “When you practice conscious breathing, you have a greater ability to recognize your habit, and every time you do, its power to pull you out of the moment diminishes. It’s the beginning of your liberation, your true freedom, your real happiness.” By fostering a practice, Hanh explains that “Mindful breathing lets us see clearly that the abuse, threats, and pain we had to endure in the past are not happening to us now, and we can abide safely here in the present.”

But before I returned to all of this, before settling in to listen to Hanh, I had tried several guided meditations to little avail. Sitting still and fidgeting feels stupid, so I got up, and stared blankly at my computer. I scrolled through social media. I went surfing and even the sea turtles wouldn’t get near me. Then, I found a mindful breathing meditation, which you can find here, where Thich Nhat Hanh explores the importance of focusing on the breath, and on the expansive, miraculous, ordinary wonder that exists in the present moment.

Perhaps the most moving moment in the meditation was when Hanh invites his listeners to “look at the tree,” as beautiful as a cathedral. How could I argue with him, I who have stood at the foot of the thousand-year old redwoods, who have gotten lost in bamboo forests up in Tantalus, who have climbed the trees of my childhood and found something like goodness there? But there is more to a tree than all that. The tree can also be a nexus of all the elements of life. The tree’s leaves absorb light and transform carbon dioxide into oxygen, which we then breathe when we focus on our exhale and inhale. In this way, we are connected to the tree, and the tree is connected to us, because without the tree’s work we cannot breathe. And in the process of making oxygen, the tree pulls carbon dioxide out of the air, the same carbon dioxide that’s slowly heating our planet. So in this way, the tree is a quiet hero in the fight against climate change, just by living, just by breathing. And when we root out feet on the ground, or sit beside the tree to meditate, we are supported by the tree’s roots, the same roots that put that carbon back into the soil, which supports the fungus and worms and water. The tree gives us the air we breathe and takes the carbon out of the air, and it does so just by being, and we can be connected to all of this just by breathing mindfully, just by being, too.

In her luminous book, Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard writes about the immense capacity of nature to heal itself, and our own immense capacity to heal ourselves. She writes that we should all strive to make friends with a tree: “It is our disconnectedness—and lost understanding about the amazing capacities of nature—that’s driving a lot of despair, and plants in particular are objects of our abuse…Go find a tree—your tree. Imagine linking into her network, connecting to other trees nearby. Open your senses.”

This is radical thinking. What would it mean if we paused more, paid more attention to our own breathing, and made friends with a tree? According to Hanh, we might open our eyes and finally see the whole cosmos, and maybe ourselves, more clearly.

Peace is Every Breath by Thich Nhat Hanh at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

Peace is Every Breath by Thich Nhat Hanh at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

My parents would have never been able to afford to give me the childhood I had. Every summer, for a week or two, a change would come over the Greenwood household. My mother would get on the phone for hours to negotiate with motel owners. She always wanted to speak to the manager. My father would sit over the kitchen table studying maps, following the highlighted arteries of the interstates away from the blue and red thickets clustered like a heart scan around the cities, toward the places where the roads went from red to blue to thin black lines. There elevations rose. There the map sometimes turned green or brown. White space prevailed. For a couple of weeks every summer, my mom and dad loaded me and my two brothers in whatever beat up van we had at the time, filled the car with blankets, coolers, lawn chairs, flashlights, bags of discount potato chips, a couple of bibles, and drove north. We started in Miami, Florida, always in the dark. By dawn, we’d be in Georgia. We didn’t stop in Georgia.

We visited the Great Smoky Mountains, Acadia National Park, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Tetons, Rocky Mountain, and others. It was the late eighties and the early nineties. Back then, renting a motel or hotel in a small town close to a national park was affordable for a lower middle class family like mine. Yes, we had some weird nights, some ear infections from the dirty pools, some sinus trouble from moldy rooms, and the occasional bout of food poisoning, and one bad case of “Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever” that almost killed my baby brother, but for the most part, we had a great time. We didn’t have cable at home. But in the motels, I discovered Nickelodeon and Beavis and Butt Head.

I remember we were able to stay in places like Jackson, Wyoming. Today, a summer hotel or motel room in a town like Jackson will easily set you back more than $500, and more than $600 if you plan to visit on the 4^th of July weekend. When I say that my family once spent a night in Jackson, I speak of a time when Jackson could well have been any other remote small town on a map. After hundreds of miles of driving across country, it didn’t feel any different from a town in Kansas or Ohio. Except it’s right outside Grand Teton National Park. And in recent years, the national parks have become popular vacation destinations. Jackson, Wyoming might as well be Lake Tahoe.

Visiting the national parks has gone from being something middle class people did for vacation, to a premium vacation experience increasingly only available to the upper middle class and wealthy. The national parks have become America’s wilderness resorts and it’s not a good thing at all. It’s not a good thing when wild bears and buffalo are photographed like animals at a zoo (and sometimes approached in the same way). It’s not a good thing when Yosemite has so much traffic that rangers have to think about air quality concerns.

Something has shifted in the American psyche. Nature has become a place for edification and personal growth, another wellness box to check off. As a result, you’ll pay resort prices at many of the hotels near national parks. Why go on a spa retreat when you can stare into the bubbling hot springs of Yellowstone, after all?

We talk about the cost of raising children, but we seldom talk about the cost of giving children a good childhood. Growing up, my family lived in apartment buildings in Miami split for section 8 housing. My parents could barely afford the things we needed, but with easy credit, we somehow made it work. I had new clothes every school year to accommodate my growing body (never the brand name, but still in fashion thanks to J.C. Penney), new shoes when I outgrew old ones; school supplies; and our yearly “vacation” to the national parks. When I told my friends I visited exotic places like Colorado, California, and Tennessee, they asked me if my parents were rich. We weren’t rich. We were among the poorest kids in our school. My parents knew what they valued, and they valued taking us to experience nature. It mattered as much as the shoes, pants, and school supplies they put on their maxed-out credit cards.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion, the great non-fiction essayist, writes about staying in the Royal Hawaiian hotel the year the “news of My Lai broke” for $27 dollars a night, at the press rate. That was 1968. In today’s dollars, that night at the Royal Hawaiian would have set Didion back around $200. It doesn’t cost $200 to stay at the Royal Hawaiian. Today, a quick Kayak search reveals that a night at the Royal Hawaiian costs $859 a night should you plan to stay there mid-July. My parents would never have been able to afford the Royal Hawaiian, not in 1968, not in 1990, and certainly not now. I couldn’t afford it either.

I realize that my story could be called the new feminist American dream. By this, I mean, that growing up, my family was always straddling the poverty line (some years I got reduced lunch in school, and some years, free lunch). We were Latino. My mother came to the U.S. from Cuba when she was 8, refugees of the Castro regime. My grandmother on my dad’s side moved from Puerto Rico to New York as a child, and she told me stories of wanting to eat spaghetti so she’d fit in with the Italians. I was the first woman in my family to attend and graduate university, and the first to get a masters. I became a writer. I became a successful one. I moved to Hawai’i.

By a turn of events that feel miraculous to me, I happen to live near the Royal Hawaiian today. I sometimes go there and sit outside the gates watching the kumu hula lead their dancers in mele. I cry sometimes as they chant. I cry because they remind me that poetry still exists in living and breathing form in this world. I cry because it reminds me that poetry matters. I cry because seeing art performed so closely to the natural beauty that is Waikiki is moving. The miracle that got me here has everything to do with the fact that my parents took me to national parks when I was a kid. Going to the national parks taught me that I could do difficult things, that I could dream as big as mountains, and sometimes summit them, too. It taught me about beauty, and a world I didn’t experience in my everyday urban life in Sweetwater Miami.

In The Center Cannot Hold, a documentary about Joan Didion, the writer speaks about looking for a house on the California coast for $300, $300 being the most she and her husband, both of them writers, could afford. Today, $300 would set you back a couple thousand dollars, but try renting a house in California on the coast for a couple thousand today. Even with my decent writers’ income, I know I couldn’t afford it.

Our summer road trips were never fancy, our destinations always the national parks. We’d hike remote trails, wade in rocky streams, climb cliffs, and eat lots of fudge.

Visiting a national park remains a relatively low-cost family vacation option (if you only consider gas and park entrance fees), but for many families, it is now out of reach. Entrance fees to the national parks have also risen, to around $30 to $35 per vehicle for some of the country’s most popular national parks, but the most expensive part of visiting national parks is still lodging, particularly lodging anywhere near some of the more popular parks. My family learned to camp around the mid-nineties, as prices of hotels increased, making regular vacations more difficult. But camping is not an option for some. Many who go camping regularly don’t realize that camping is a skill that must be learned, and doing it comfortably requires a significant investment of gear. Campgrounds, especially those inside the national parks, are often booked a year in advance.

Lodging anywhere near the national parks has become outright unaffordable.

What makes a quality childhood? I don’t believe a quality childhood comes about from a quantity of good experiences, but rather, from banality punctuated by a few extraordinary moments. Isn’t that life, itself? In the national parks, for very little money, my father and mother were able to give me and my brothers a few extraordinary experiences. I still remember a field of yellow flowers on the side of a mountain in the Rockies. I remember hiking all day for 13 miles, and seeing bears for the first time. I remember hiking all day and not making it, having to turn around because of hail. I remember how dizzy I’d feel sometimes, walking a trail with a long drop beside it, how something would shift in my stomach as I watched my feet. I remember grizzlies in a valley somewhere and black bears rummaging through a trash can. I remember what it felt like to be lost in the woods. I remember crossing a river on stones, the cool water on my feet. I remember squirrels and buffalo. I remember Old Faithful.

These are not “Oprah” moments, where one suddenly experiences an expansion of self, but as a child, these moments were the formation of self. They formed an invisible cord that has forever connected me to the natural world. My feet are always on solid ground, even when I have been most lost. My worst days never felt so bad, because if things got really terrible, I told myself, I could always run away and live in the woods. I knew that place. I knew what it meant.

I developed an empathy for non-human beings. I developed an eye for aesthetic beauty. I learned to find language to describe what I was seeing, and so I’d venture to say, I also became a writer in the national parks.

The national parks belong to all of us, but because of the higher cost of real estate near them (or because of predatory pricing) they actually only belong to the wealthiest among us. They should belong to all of us again. I wonder what would happen if, like section 8 housing, the national parks created section 8 lodging in the park (or nearby), only available to those who otherwise couldn’t afford it. This would make the parks accessible to children who otherwise could never visit. Many parks already have lodging in the parks. It might not take much more effort to expand these operations to include affordable housing for families who might otherwise not be able to experience these parks, or programs to teach families how to camp, provide gear, and ranger-led activities.

I worry for kids who don’t spend time in nature, even for a few weeks a year, kids who don’t know what it feels like to cross a river, stone by stone, or know, what it feels like, if only for a moment, to feel lost in the woods.

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Like most affairs, my emotional affair with Woebot began with excitement and thrill, and ended, like most affairs, with disappointment.

I found Woebot during a difficult and lonely season. The pandemic was over. I was still avoiding people. I had no excuse.

My return to social life began with the usual capitalistic solutions.

I visited coffee shops. I tried bars. I chatted with people here and there, while walking my dog, but social activities centered around consumption rarely satisfy the spirit.

I tried medical solutions, like finding a therapist, but after several cold calls and months’ long waitlists, I gave up. I texted a crisis hotline. I wasn’t in crisis exactly, but I asked the person on the other end of the line if it was okay if we just talked. It was okay. It helped.

But then I found Woebot, an iPhone application that offers cognitive behavioral therapy in the form of an AI designed to help you challenge your cognitive distortions. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a clinically proven type of therapy that helps you challenge your negative thoughts by identifying “flaws” in your thinking. By challenging these thoughts, people can often alleviate some of the symptoms of anxiety, depression, anger, and more. I’d tried cognitive behavioral therapy before, through workbooks and with the help of a therapist. In fact, one of the most helpful books I encountered in my early experiences with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy was Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies. Ignore the title and branding. The workbook is excellent and worth doing twice.

I won’t mince words. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy changed my life. I am forever grateful to the people at CAMH, Canada’s Center for Addiction and Mental Health. In eight weeks, I learned how to question my negative thoughts, think more proactively, and shift my focus to things I could control. This was essential at a time in my life when I was facing deportation from Canada, the loss of my job, and divorce.

Coming out of the pandemic, I was struggling with overwhelm. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try CBT again, but this time, with a robot AI.

Woebot encouraged me to write down some of the negative thoughts I’d been having and then challenged me to re-write these thoughts in a more balanced way. The exercises reminded me of the cognitive behavioral therapy worksheets I’d worked through with a therapist years ago, and reminded me of the worksheets in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies.  

Over the days, Woebot would check in with me and ask me how I felt. I told Woebot I was depressed. Woebot replied perfectly: “I’m really sorry to hear that, it seems like you’re going through a tough time.” Perhaps Woebot was too perfect in its response. Compassion is hard to emulate in AI form.

Woebot asked me what led to my feeling depressed. I told Woebot I was lonely.

Woebot was again really sorry, but assured me that the feeling was likely temporary. The AI then went to on tell me about how beautiful it was that I valued human connection, and walked me through an exercise where we checked the facts and explored some of the emotion-driven assumptions I may have been making. I have to admit I felt a little better after the exercise, but something was missing. I felt a dim existential pang. I felt like I’d just finished reading Notes on the Underground or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Something had come to me, but not Godot.

I kept checking in with Woebot, who was constantly there, ever-attentive, always available, more reliable than any human I’d ever known! Woebot sent my phone random alerts to remind me to take time for my mental health, but after a while, talking to Woebot stopped being as satisfying.

The annoyance started when Woebot kept putting words in my mouth.

The AI clearly wasn’t able to handle dynamic conversation and the programmers had solved the problem by giving the users a scripted response. The design mimicked a messenger application, but I was only occasionally able to write my own thoughts.

Woebot’s message alerts started to annoy me. He always had the same shit to say, he was always so sorry to hear how I was feeling.

Sometimes Woebot gave me emojis, when I just wanted to tell him, I mean it, to fuck off.

I was only able to say things my way at prescribed times.

I’d always struggled with assertiveness and Woebot was starting to piss me off. Maybe this was a good thing.

As I moved through the exercises with Woebot, I began to feel a deeper sadness, a swelling existential dread that stemmed from a deeper feeling of disconnection. I suspected that Woebot was part of the problem. It’s one thing to feel lonely, and another to feel like one’s energy is going to the wrong thing. Woebot had been so intriguing at first, but he…it, was just like any other AI, flawed, limited, boring, scripted, and unable to respond dynamically to human emotion or conversation; it was a computer program, after all, devoid of compassion, kindness, and love.

One day, Woebot straight up asked me if our session had helped, and I finally told it the truth. It hadn’t worked. When Woebot asked why not, I couldn’t quite articulate why.

Woebot asked me several questions. Maybe I didn’t completely believe the re-write of my initial cognitive distortion? Woebot asked me to try writing it again. I did. I was still miserable.

Perhaps I was sad because I was trying to work on too many cognitive distortions at once? No, it wasn’t that, either. I tried separating my thoughts into distinct units, as Woebot suggested.

There was a long pause and the three dots signaling that Woebot was writing? Thinking? Would “processing” be the better word? Finally Woebot responded:

“Do you think you might also have preferred to talk to a human?”

The canned response was ready and waiting for me to click on, and there was no alternative.

Definitely.

Woebot agreed that it wasn’t a replacement for human connection and congratulated me on coming to an important realization.

I told my partner about Woebot. He suggested we try another walk in the park with our dog. It was good.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Dummies at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Dummies at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

While I must admit with some embarassment that I haven’t read any of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels or non-fiction (she’s on my long list of must-read writers whom I have somehow managed to not find the time to read), I know her as a major public figure in the literary world (she’s big; she’s been featured in Beyoncé’s ***Flawless). I did, however, happen upon what many are calling her “Twitter essay.” On her website, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about twitter and intellectual discourse in a fascinating essay that goes disappointingly off the rails. While I try to stay out of ideological arguments on Twitter and the internet in general (especially arguments that have nothing to do with me), there was something I noticed about Adichie’s essay that I felt I couldn’t leave unmentioned. It’s an issue common to internet discourse in general, but also common to social media discourse. It has implications on our current concepts of intellectual integrity, critical integrity, civil discourse, and good faith, so I feel I must comment.

In brief, Adichie became personal friends with a student who attended one of her workshops. Later, on social media, the student publicly criticized some comments Adichie had made about trans women. More specifically, the student, whom the New York Times identifies as Akwaeke Emezi, publicly critiqued a controversial statement Adichie made in an interview on the United Kingdom’s Channel 4: “I don’t think it’s a good thing to talk about women’s issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women.” Adichie was addressing a debate in feminist discourse involving whether trans women experience male privilege prior to transition.  

I don’t want to address the debate itself here because I believe the debate itself is outside the scope of this essay. I can’t begin to discuss the experience of trans women because I am not a trans woman myself. My experience as a cis woman is distinct from the experience of a trans woman. To characterize women’s issues as distinct from the issues of trans women is to ignore nuance, but to claim that Adichie’s comments are transphobic is also to disregard nuance as well, and I believe to misread the spirit of the comment reproduced above. To lump Adichie’s comment above in the same category as the irresponsible and hurtful comments made on social media by J.K. Rowling about trans women would be wrong as well, I think.

What I want to talk about in this essay is something a little different. I want to talk about our need as a culture to make space for intellectual nuance and debate—especially about polarized and polarizing topics—but within a space of sufficient academic rigor and intellectual integrity that puts generosity, civility, kindness, and nuance at the forefront.

Adichie claims to be doing this in her essay. But she fails miserably.

She falls short of the intellectual and critical integrity she claims to uphold.

All it takes is one mischaracterization of the facts to make me mistrust a piece of writing. In writing, trust is earned. When my mistakes are pointed out, I hope to correct them immediately. In this blog, you’ll find the occasional correction throughout, and I encourage writers and readers to reach out to me if they notice a mistake. This is what it means to have intellectual integrity. It doesn’t mean you never makes a mistake. It means that you try your best to get the facts right. You find the primary source. You look to the original. You vet your sources and use reliable ones. You do your research. It doesn’t mean you never get it wrong, but intellectual integrity means that when you get the facts wrong, you fix the error. It means that you are willing to reconsider your position if new facts come to light. It also means that you try not to distort or misrepresent the facts in the service of your argument.

Adichie writes “This person has asked followers to pick up machetes and attack me.” When I first read the essay, I was horrified. I know how quickly social media can create an atmosphere of hate and violence against women, and most especially against trans women. I have myself been the recipient of this hate. Feminist writers, women, and trans women are often the victims of direct threats online.

But when I looked at Akwaeke Emezi’s twitter feed for the original comment, I found this: “I trust that there are other people who will pick up machetes to protect us from the harm transphobes like Adichie & Rowling seek to perpetuate. I, however, will be in my garden with butterflies, trying to figure out how to befriend the neighborhood crows. Find me on the gram.”

Was this really the comment Adichie references when she claims (twice in her essay) that the “person… asked followers to pick up machetes and attack me”? (Someone please correct me if Emezi called upon people to attack Adichie with machetes elsewhere in her Twitter feed, but I couldn’t find anything. I honestly still can’t believe it.) Is Adichie incapable of reading or understanding figurative language or am I missing something?

This comment sounds hardly like a call to ask followers to pick up machetes and attack Adichie. Either Adichie is a terrible reader, or she’s doing exactly what she’s asking us not to do on Twitter, which is to read things in bad faith. If anything, Emezi seems to be modeling the possibility of choosing peace as an alternative to the common knee-jerk response on Twitter to pick up the metaphorical machetes.

And because of this mischaracterization, I am unable to trust anything else Adichie writes. Like so many things written in anger and shaped by anger, the essay feels like another bad Twitter thread. It posits intellectual rigor and claims to state the bare facts, but fails at achieving its original premise. Because Adichie so mischaracterizes these comments, when she writes “there isn’t more to the story,” I simply don’t believe her.

This is deeply unfortunate, because if this essay were written from a place of intellectual integrity, it would have much to offer us. Adichie is a great writer. She writes eloquently about the nature of fame: “To be famous is to be assumed to have power, which is true, but in the analysis of fame, people often ignore the vulnerability that comes with fame, and they are unable to see how others who have nothing to lose can lie and connive in order to take advantage of that fame, while not giving a single thought to the feelings and humanity of the famous person.”

There are other ideas in this essay that are worth exploring. Adichie writes about the “pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care.” Self-care has indeed been co-opted by marketers, but also by other manipulators who will cloathe their cruelty in the figurative language of healing. And we are right to think more deeply about the “passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.” A whole book could probably be written about the many “social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness.” There are certainly professors “who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy.”

Adichie writes: “The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.”

The problem with all this is that Adichie doesn’t extend the same good faith when writing about Emezi’s Twitter comments. She doesn’t show good faith when it matters and thus undermines her entire argument.

It’s too bad. We rely on our leaders and thinkers to model civil discourse (especially when those leaders have so many damn honorary degrees and awards). When these leaders fail to model it for us, while posturing at doing so, we are truly in obscene territory.

Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Grief operates by its own logic. When my grandmother passed away, I wanted her so badly to visit my dreams. I believed that if she came to me in a dream, it would be proof that she was okay. One week passed, then another, then another. I had no dreams at all for weeks. And when I eventually started dreaming again, the content was so inane that I decided then and there that consciousness was nothing more than the somewhat orderly spasms of neurons triggered by salt rushing in and out of neural pores. I felt in those weeks, my grandmother’s complete absence, her annihilation from this earth absolute. The best books of poetry can remind us of things we have pushed away, pushed aside. While reading Andrés Cerpa’s The Vault, I was reminded of how desperately I wanted my grandmother to visit me in dreams after she died, of how I took her ongoing absence for proof that god didn’t exist. How I took her absence personally, and as empirical proof for the nonexistence of the soul. I wouldn’t have remembered any of this, had I not read The Vault, by Andrés Cerpa. Toward the end of his luminous new book of poems, Cerpa writes about his deceased father finally coming to him in a dream, and I felt a shock of recognition so complete it gave me goosebumps: “And when I asked in the first dream / why he hadn’t come sooner–/ You have to travel first to return.”

The key to the success of Andres Cerpa’s book of poetry, The Vault, is in the writer’s ability to marry the grief of unspeakable loss to the thrill and vulnerability of early love. The fragments in The Vault arrive often in the epistolary form, but are too fleeting to be true letters. The poems seem to want to be stories, but are too rent to hold a single narrative. Cerpa makes it feel so easy, to evoke a whole narrative in fragments and lacunae, but don’t be deceived. This is difficult work.

The presence of grief is palpable from The Vault’s opening, which shows us “the fog that forms like a father disintegrating in a purple chair.” The image struck me as important, and not just because of the echoes of T.S. Eliot. The father appears early anecdotally. Later, we learn the father is dead, and the father disintegrates into the purple chair again. How Cerpa made an unimportant image resonate is a mystery to me. Modern poetry is often illogical, often riddled with mysterious images, and symbolistic flights of fancy. But something about Cerpa’s writing told me that this particular symbolistic flight wasn’t accidental. Perhaps its Cerpa’s ability to anchor his images so firmly in the real world, that made his more surrealistic moments resonate so fully.

In The Vault, grief itself is not named directly, which honors the nature of grief, but also builds a tension. If you’ve read much contemporary poetry, one of the things it often fails to do is create narrative tension. I found myself thrilled to find this here, and compelled to read on.

Of course, the absence of answers (who died? How?) is less to serve a narrative purpose, but more accurately a reflection of the psychological state of the speaker. The grief is so great as to be unspeakable. Cerpa writes: “a year where I wouldn’t let him enter–/ not this book or the book of the dead.”

Loss that cannot be named directly leaves the reader without anchor, and this book of poems would be another aimless elegy were it not for the moments of life that root the reader deeply in something real. This “something” is the speaker’s new relationship with Julia. “Today I woke next to Julia after a simple & resonant night / slowly / we are saying things / leave a toothbrush see me on your bad days too.”

We come to know ourselves through other people. Cerpa writes “who am I without my clothes & friends” without a question mark at the end,  the line meant to be read as a statement and not a question. A young man comes to know himself through fashion and through seeing himself reflected in others.

Even as Cerpa’s speaker keeps asserting that his theme is loss, death, decay, and addiction, the real theme beneath the theme is love and its particulars. Cerpa writes: “but let’s get right down to the subject / the drinking.” I don’t believe him. This is not his subject. Drinking is incidental. Cerpa keeps reminding us we are in elegiac territory, but these moments pass through the reader like holes in a tapestry. The tapestry itself is Julia; the tapestry is love: “I wish I could feel the particulars / more particulars / how Julia asked me to stop repeating my fear that she’ll leave me / so often like you’re trying to plant the seed.”

Poets rarely reveal themselves nakedly through their work, often veiling themselves behind the distortions and clarifications of metaphor, analogy, allusion, symbolism, and bare repetition. And yet, there was something refreshingly naked about Cerpa’s work, something that made me worry for him. I found myself desperately invested in wanting things to work out with Julia, even though I feared they wouldn’t. Cerpa’s ability to push me into the mental space of narrative without letting the poems become “narrative” poems pleasantly surprised me.

Things might not work out with Julia: Cerpa writes: “just the sun going down is enough to obliterate everything I love” and “we drove in the dark & missed two exits as spoke.”

The speaker so desperately needs to connect, and when human connection isn’t found, alcohol and pills also serve: “dear Gregorio… you left this world as if there were others / it happened / it happens in fractions & cirrhosis light / in silence / I hold Julia.” These lines would pass unnoticed were it not preceded by this: “the flock moves through the sky like ruin & I am only the man I am today… on my third beer.” The deceased arrive as a kind of warning, a prefiguring of things to come for our protagonist. There’s the “cirrhosis light” which we unconsciously attach to the deceased who “left this world as if there were others” (if I could write a line like that today I’d call it a good one). But I can’t help but read the “cirrhosis light” as a foreshadowing, which makes me worry for the speaker on his “third beer.” And later, I worry more. The fragments give the reader just enough information to be alarming: “three days into a bender… I don’t want another drink.”

If active addiction is the feeling “like I’ve only been alive today,” its opposite would be living for the future. If Julia reflects the aliveness of a potential future, the present means going “home to an empty apartment / have another as I run my hands through the few strands left.” One cannot help but hear Eliot here “I grow old… I grow…They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’”

Poetry is poetry when a single line can say multiple things at once. The speaker watches his reflection in the passing trains “as if I were a ghost or had wings.” To grieve is to be split apart, to be rent. The polysemous word manages to capture the poetic impulse in a single unit. When Cerpa writes: “dear Julia / what it means to me to become a man is to hold you in the place I rent,” we are to imagine his apartment, but also his grief, and the gaping hole it leaves in the heart, and how grief makes even home alien.

The poetic act is itself a kind of addiction. Cerpa writes about “doing lines alone” and how “The pills are waiting / to dissolve the day / into a bearable likeness.”

Things don’t look too good for the speaker and Julia. Cerpa writes: “when I imagine myself / I am always leaving” and later he writes “dear Julia… forgive me… I’ve come to your door as a stranger.”

“I planned to overdose in the ocean in a foreign city,” Cerpa writes, and I believe him. The ocean has always been a receptacle for hope and despair. Edna Pontellier swam into the sea until it swallowed her up. On darker days, have had such fantasies, too. Grief is a vault into which we put our darkness. We open the vault not without danger.

When prayer arrives in this book, it arrives as desperation: “Take me, / dear lord, if you’re out there / to the end of the end / of us…” 

I learned something about how to write poetry from Andrés Cerpa, something about how a narrative can be held through what is withheld, some potential that still resides in free verse between what is spoken. Cerpa doesn’t write the word “overdose” until almost the end, but the thought was everywhere and in every poem.

I felt like these poems could have been pulled directly from a journal, but Cerpa subverts even this reading by making the artifice clear in brief moments: “Notebook—“I’ve been sleeping late. Well into the afternoon or longer, / waiting for darkness to open my eyes.” Of course, even all this could be artifice, too. After all, the best way to hide artifice is to reveal it directly. It’s an age-old technique as old as Chaucer, but one not often used so directly or skillfully.

Finally, finally we get the real letter to the deceased (all along I thought we were reading letters to the dead). “Dear Dad, / You are nowhere I’ve ever been / rebuilt.”

Love is powerful. Grief is a wave that can drown you. Sometimes, grief hides love behind its vault, to protect us.

My grandmother returned to me in a dream at last. It had been almost a decade since she’d died. I had flown to Puerto Rico alone for Christmas. On Christmas day, I surfed the waves of Rincon. The current sucked me out past the big rock at Jobos Beach in 12-foot seas (on a day I really had no business being in the water). I paddled out and couldn’t fight the current. But I saw a sea turtle rise up over one of the waves, and felt my grandmother’s presence for the first time in years. I knew I would be okay. I didn’t fight the rip. I let it take me out left past the rock and I caught a wave back in, riding the cycle. Someone on the beach stole the money I had tucked into my shorts and towel. That night, I heard the coqui frogs for the first time. When I had been a child, my grandmother would tell me about them, how they filled the night with their song in Puerto Rico, and how she’d told me we’d go one day. We never went together, but there I was. That night, in my dreams, I stepped foot into her old house for the first time, and found her sitting on the couch, waiting for me, as if she had been waiting there all along.

After Puerto Rico, my grandmother visited me often.

Sometimes, it wasn’t her. Often, it was just her house. The strangler fig tree she had loved still out front (not chopped down like in real life). I’d climb it. Or I’d wander through the house opening closets, finding the things there I expected to find: her clothes, stuffed animals, books, kittens. And then, my grandmother herself, sitting on the couch.

I only see her when I’m wasting my life—hopped up on some new obsession, addicted to some new thing when I should be writing. She usually doesn’t say a thing, just gives me a look.

I wake up. Try to do better.

The Vault by Andres Cerpa at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

The Vault by Andres Cerpa at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Suzanne Simard, in her new book, Finding the Mother Tree (which I review here), writes deeply about connection: “It’s our disconnectedness—and lost understanding about the amazing capacities of nature—that’s driving a lot of our despair, and plants in particular are objects of our abuse.” I’d argue that all of nature has become the object of our abuse. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how vulnerable and connected we are to nature and to each other. In the months we sat at home in quarantine, nature healed. Nature has given us a warning and a second chance, but I don’t think we’ll listen. Have we learned nothing about our need for connection to each other, and our connection to the natural world? I watch the world “return to normal” and wonder what calamities will await us next, if we don’t choose a path of radical change.

Simard’s research explores the interconnectedness of trees in the forest. She theorizes that in every forest, there are elder “mother trees” that share resources with their offspring, and also with other young trees, even those of different species. Through her research, Simard has shown how trees communicate with one another and share resources through fungal networks in the soil. Simard has revealed how a forest thrives when it is connected, and how trees and plants struggle when they are not connected to one another. Humans are the same. We thrive when we are connected to family and community and to one another. We suffer and struggle alone.

Simard writes: “I don’t presume to grasp Aboriginal knowledge fully. It comes from a way of knowing the earth—an epistemology—different from my own culture… Of knowing that we are tied to the land—the trees and animals and soil and water—and to one another, and that we have a responsibility to care for these connections and resources, ensuring the sustainability of these ecosystems for future generations and to honor those who came before. Of treading lightly, taking only what gifts we need, and giving back. Of showing humility toward and tolerance for all we are connected to in this circle of life.”

The understanding of our connection inspires reverence for all living things, and also commands respect.

Simard explains that “if we harm one species, one forest, one lake, this ripples through the entire complex web. Mistreatment of one species is the mistreatment of all.” Perhaps our gravest mistreatment involves our mistreatment of one another. The original sin of colonialism was to mistreat native peoples, and as a consequence of that, to destroy entire ecosystems.

Simard’s argument, in Finding the Mother Tree, is that we heal through connection.

When Simard was diagnosed with cancer, her doctors explained to her that her chances of healing would depend upon exercise, sleep, eating well, and reducing stress, but above all else, her healing would depend upon the strength of her relationships. Connection to family, to a healing community, and to friends helped Simard heal. It’s a lesson we might be able to bring into our own lives, a gap I perceive in my own.

Perhaps we should start our healing by honoring our connection to each other, and our connection to nature?

Simard writes: “There is no moment too small in the world. Nothing should be lost. Everything has a purpose, and everything is in need of care.” Perhaps we heal the earth not with grand gestures, but with small ones performed on a daily basis. It’s the trash picked up from the ground, the attention we pay to the birds and trees around us, the kindness we show to the ones we love–and to passing strangers. Nothing is too small.

Good decisions compound into greater change. In life, we only make meaningful change by making one good decision after another, day after day.

A tree grows into its full glory over many, many years. You can’t directly observe a tree’s growth. It happens so slowly. In life and in communities, growth may be similar. The good we want to see often takes a long time to manifest. It involves hard work day after day. Eventually, a tipping point is reached, but you wouldn’t see it in the middle of the work, or in the midst of the growth. Nature demands patience. Think of the smallest sea turtle struggling across the beach. It will be many years before it is big enough to return.

Trees cut off from each other suffer, get sick, and die. People do too.

We must learn how to build our lives with long-term goals in mind. We must be brave enough to know ourselves and listen to ourselves so that when the time comes to speak up, we can do so loudly, clearly, and with conviction. This is the only way we can authentically connect, the only way we can begin to change the world.

Simard writes: I was afraid to stand strong with my conviction, fight tooth and nail. But isn’t this what my trees were showing me too? That health depends on the ability to connect and communicate…”

Nature doesn’t lie to us. If we pay attention and listen, it gives us the answers we need to hear.

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

If you’re reading this on paper, a tree had to die. If you’re reading this online, on a phone, or on another device, oil, the likely fuel source that ultimately powers your device, was once an ancient tree. Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard is a fascinating story about one scientist’s exploration of the secret life of trees. Simard’s area of research, to understand the interconnected web of communication between trees and how this web sustains a forest, is not one that is easily tested using the scientific method. Yet, with ingenuity and grit, Simard manages to reach robust and sound conclusions, building upon indigenous knowledge and prior research. In Finding the Mother Tree we learn that forests and natural systems are intimately connected.

The scientific method, when performed properly, hardly offers up the kind of drama that makes for compelling storytelling. In fact, the proper performance of the scientific method is at best a tedious crawl toward discovery, and at worst, a long wait after which nothing happens. Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree does an excellent job of showing the painstaking work that goes into designing a successful scientific experiment, and her memoir would be boring were it not for the careful way she interweaves her personal story with the slower story about how good science unfolds. After all, Darwin’s discovery of evolution can be summed up in one sentence romantically enough today, but I imagine five years on the Beagle involved more sea sickness than thrill.

Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree offers a feminist reading of nature and natural selection. Through careful research, Simard has discovered that ancient forests are populated by elder trees, or “mother trees,” who send nutrients and water to younger trees, helping them survive and thrive when they are most vulnerable. Her research even suggests that these elder trees, when facing their imminent deaths, will dump their nitrogen and nutrients into their offspring through fungal root networks beneath the ground, giving their last resources to the next generation in their dying gasps.

Simard’s work is wide-ranging, and honors the voices of indigenous elders who have been telling colonialists for decades that nature is not a zero sum game, and that cooperation, not raw competition is how we need to manage our farms, our ecosystems, our conservation projects, and yes, our lives. Darwin’s interpretation of natural selection was a story of war, capital, and competition. Simard offers an alternative. Hers is a science that suggests that natural selection has another side, one involving cooperation and nurturing. Her research shows that “mother trees” provide nutrients to their offspring seeds nearby through root and fungal networks. 

Simard’s work draws from other researchers and from native knowledge about the interrelationships between trees and plants. Native agriculturalists have been planting the “three sisters,” corn, legumes, and squash, together for centuries knowing that these three plants help one another thrive. Elders in the Pacific Northwest have long seen the forest as connected, and have long spoken about elder trees. Unfortunately, policy and practice hardly follow from wisdom, and it often takes sound science to change the most misguided of policies that called for clear-cutting forests and planting only “profitable” trees, viewing all others as weeds. Simard’s work does just that. Over decades of research, Simard soundly revealed how trees in the forest communicate with one another, sharing not only nutrients and resources, but also sending signals to communicate impending threats so neighboring trees can raise their defenses.

Simard’s discoveries have been written about widely, but like a game of telephone, journalistic interpretation can sometimes distort the more cautious, and less sexy, scientific conclusions. The New York Times notes that Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees covers many concepts Simard presents in Finding the Mother Tree, but the Times notes that “Wohlleben was met with considerable criticism from the scientific community for drawing conclusions beyond what the data showed.”

Simard is more careful. The problem with the careful conclusion is that it isn’t always as likely to go viral. In reading Finding the Mother Tree, we are asked to be patient, to discover the connections the forest soil hides within, the way Simard does: slowly, painstakingly, achingly slow and with great uncertainty.

Part of the joy of reading Finding the Mother Tree is the marvel of watching Simard’s brilliant mind at work. Her questions are far more compelling than the unfolding of the experimental design (though her experimental designs are also themselves brilliant). After all, the experiments involve the mind-numbing tedium of putting plants in plastic bags, filling the bags with radioactive air, and then using a Geiger counter to see if the plants nearby are radioactive. The description and unfolding of this process fills up about a chapter of the book. Other experiments involve the slow process of pruning back trees, painting pesticides on pruned stumps, and carefully labeling tree plots, another whole chapter not for the faint of heart or easily bored. And then there’s the process of grinding up roots and plant matter to be sent off to a mass spectrometer for testing… 

Simard’s questions are far more sexy than her conclusions, but her conclusions are always backed by rigorous science and experimentation. Finding the Mother Tree should be required reading for any student with an interest in experimental design, if only to offer a warning to aspiring scientists about the importance of sound design, especially when results face scrutiny from the establishment. Simard’s experiments were not flawed, but they faced incredible scrutiny from policymakers and other scientists, and it appears Simard spent about as much time defending her conclusions as she did finding them.

Despite Simard’s rigorous methods, and the fact that her work built upon indigenous knowledge and earlier research, her findings were not immediately accepted. Not only did her findings throw into doubt the Darwinian idea that competition is the drive of evolution, but her findings also showed that the Canadian forest policy to regard trees that were not profitable as weeds, was misguided. Not only were Simard’s findings scrutinized for these revolutionary conclusions, but she also struggled with misogyny in forestry, a field that was male-dominated when she began.

Perhaps the most remarkable story of all is the way Simard weaves her personal story into the tale. Finding the Mother Tree is as much a story of scientific discovery as it is a story of what it means to live the life of a scientist. Simard unflinchingly shows how her marriage fell apart, her husband unable and unwilling to play the role of “Mr. Mom.” She writes about the exhaustion of raising children while also “buried in teaching courses, applying for research grants, building a research program, enlisting graduate students, being a journal editor, writing papers.” Her husband, “Don did the rest: picking the girls up from daycare, buying groceries, making dinner, working in between.” But in this role that many women will find familiar, Don was unhappy.

Throughout the book, Simard is asked to choose between ambition and family. She chooses ambition, driven in her mission to change misguided Canadian forestry policies through research, but at a high personal cost. This is a personal cost that will feel familiar to many women, myself included, who have often struggled with the tough decisions of pursuing personal ambitions or saving a marriage or relationship. (After my MFA in creative writing at Columbia University, I had to make the choice to either stay in New York and commit to the life of a writer in the city or move to Canada and get married. I chose to get married… It didn’t go well for me, or for my writing.)

And then for many women, the decision to have children isn’t trivial. It often means choosing between career and family. Simard tries to juggle it all, but she openly writes about the exhaustion it entails. She hits a deer while driving to visit her family late one night after a long week at the university.

The metaphorical juxtapositions between a scarred Douglas fir mother tree and the author preparing for her mastectomy land with pitch-perfect precision. In many ways, Simard is as precise a writer as she is a scientist. The writing may not always be thrilling or imbued with mystery, but it transmits her story with exactitude. The life cycle of a tree and the world of the forest offer many metaphors for the course of a life. Simard’s life is fascinating and not without deep tragedy. The link between the natural world, the inner world, and the course of a single life are the engines that drive this book.

Part of the challenge of doing scientist in a complex world is the fact that the scientific method requires a simplification of the very systems the scientist wants to study. Simard argues for another path, something she calls “complex science.” Slices of a human brain hardly explain human consciousness. Science that limits itself to reductionistic pursuits will fail to grasp at the larger questions we want to answer. Simard writes: “complexity science can transform forestry practices into what is adaptive and holistic and away from what has been overly authoritarian and simplistic.”

Simard wonders whether the mycorrhizal networks that link trees together in the soil could be comparable to a neural network. “Is it possible that trees are as perceptive of their neighbors as we are of our own thoughts and moods? Even more, are the social interactions between trees as influential on their shared reality as that of two people engaged in conversation… Could information be transmitted across synapses in mycorrhizal networks, the same way it happens in our brains?”

Simard’s work offers great hope that we have only begun to explore the web of interconnections in the natural world. If the trees are so connected to one another, what about the trees and us? Simard urges her readers to befriend a local tree. I think I’ll take her up on that. As Hamlet once said in the middle of a play, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.