Interbeing

This morning I woke up and saw on my phone's news feed that Thich Nhat Hanh passed away, age 95. His pacifist engagement spanned the world of social relations, the inner world of our hearts and minds as well as the world in which we exist in interdependence with the rest of nature. To practice peace not as the absence of conflict but as a generative, creative state of existing in which we are in free communication with all beings, including ourselves, in this way I have understood mindfulness, the humblest of all spiritual practices. Be like water, the Daoists say. Seek the lowly place; do not move on before you have patiently filled up the depths you find on your way; stream to nurture life without claiming credit; be aware of your destructive potential, when you allow the storms to whip you up, flood and rage in devastating and ruthless anger. "In all four corners / the voice of the water / with its eternal disasters / is feared and heard", a classic Dutch poem tells us. The Dao is not just harmony, it is also chaos. No one can meet the Lord face to face and live, the Torah tells us. 

For our presence in the world to be like water we need a practice, a way of going about things and a way of relating to ourselves. How strange that life is something that needs to be led if it is to connect to, and embody, its own intrinsic spontaneity and gratuity. Thich Nhat Hanh showed us one of the paths we might take. The Buddha himself understood that we need the shade of a tree when we seek enlightenment, we need a refuge, or else the noonday sun will send Pan on our way, the God of the wild, and panic is sure to follow (more about the wild, why and how we need it, in a later post). To see by the light of shade is the gift of foliage, a covering-uncovering, folding and unfolding, through which the light falls in patches on the floor (Russell describes how one of his first questions was why the light patches on a forest path all have the same shape, whereas the openings in the foliage that lets the light through surely all have different shapes). Out of paradise, blissful things that render us present to each other got covered in leaves until such time as we shall no longer see through a glass, darkly, but behold face to face. In that narrative, too, the tree was there to give life, to cast out, and its leaves were there to protect, until humanity came back to the tree, this time on a mountain top, and, once again naked, settled the final settlement, releasing social order into the community of love: the narrative speaks of hope, a promise, if nothing else. In our species' imaginary the tree runs deeper than we might at first think. We climbed out of the tree and since then we have sought our way back into it. 

I am thinking of a tree: this one here, "you", as Buber says. We can have a dialogue with the individual tree here, the one I go back to again and again. I can know everything or nothing about it, and yet relate to it as this living being here, much as I can with another human being to whom I say "thou" and who says "thou" to me. Human beings can respond with an "it" or "he" or "she" or "they" to the "thou" that is extended to them. What about a tree? Is a tree more like God, as Buber sees the divine: never it, always thou? It would not surprise me. "We must change almost everything in our current societies", Greta Thunberg said. As Voices of the Future seeks to open up paths to change the way we imagine, shape and live our lives with trees, the relation between the social and the natural world, we might discover that there is a root for these all-encompassing changes. Nature is already extending its "thou" to us; we need to learn to hear and heed it and stop thinking our disasters are its disasters. We will then hear that nature, too, has a voice, and one that speaks of the future. "I speak because I have hope in others", media theorist Walter Ong wrote a long time ago in The Presence of the Word. All speaking, all communicating which is a real relating, is animated by hope, by the anticipation of a possible better future. 

From the root to the crown we can learn that the image of the tree as one-sided stability, rootedness, firmness, perhaps even patriarchal and hierarchical order (more about this later when I will discuss Descartes' image of the tree of the sciences) can be substituted by what Bloch called the "real symbol" of the tree: what trees teach us through what their being symbolises, speaks of. When children climb a tree, they enter a different world. Lofty, removed from the ground and held up by the stability of root and trunk, but itself wavy, airy, flexible, responsive. The Chinese imagination sees the tree not primarily as a symbol of firmness but of flexibility, a futurologist at Mercedes Benz told me recently (more about bamboo and the symbolism of the tree in Chuang Tzu in a later post). The two sides rise and fall together. Up there the child finds a home to fantasies, dreams, flights of fancy and of the heart, encounters with all the creatures that live up there, in the plumage between the clouds where the sights are far and the height provides safety, comfort and intimacy at the same time. You might meet the Buddha there any moment, going for a stroll because he learnt how to walk on air, or two tall dinosaurs might poke their heads up between the branches and lick your hand for a fresh green leaf or two. You might fall asleep for a while, or sit and watch quietly as an air balloon floats by gently, off into the setting sun. You may just decide to build your nest there.