Yesterday my friend Chuck wrote a newsletter about caring for one another, the way in which the symbiosis of the world is plain to see in the forest, the way trees raise each other like humans do. Trees are lucky, I thought as I read, to have these fungal threads physically linking them to one another, pulling resources from here to there, making sure little baby trees keep growing when mama and papa trees die. I don’t think humans have that guarantee.
I spent a lot of time alone as a kid, eventually learning to just take care of myself, no threads to others, fungal or otherwise, needed. I climbed trees — plum trees with their sturdy, forking branches were my early favorite; later I’d climb evergreens, with their long arms perfectly perpendicular to the ground — and sat in them for hours, sometimes imagining they were anything else, sometimes sticking my fingers where sap came out, trying to understand the world inside the living body propping me up in the air. I spent time on the ground, too, grafted pieces of moss from the ground onto the trunks of trees and vice versa, mixed water into dirt to make mud and used that to make houses for insects. Pill bugs were my favorite.
I loved to be alone; time-outs in my room were a gift of a punishment — I’d read for hours. At school, I’d sit on the swings alone at recess and have conversations with myself so often that eventually my pre-k teacher expressed concern. But I was fine; I was learning to be my own friend. I’d created a world that was my own, and protected, and it never felt to me like it needed anyone else.
As I near 30 I feel a gulf of distance between the person I was ten years ago and the person I am now. Fortunately who I am now is much closer to that girl up a tree. Fortunately I no longer feel like my world doesn’t need anyone else.