Learning from Aspen Forests
Meg Wheatley first taught me that aspen trees grow as a collective system. What looks like a forest of many trees is an underground web of connected roots, popping up occasionally as a tree. It is one system. I wonder what conditions create the popping up, the emergence of a tree.
I wonder if “mates,” learning partners could be seen this way. The root system is an energetic field or pattern. Each of us are like trees, appearing as individuals. Yet we are really a woven web. What are the conditions that help us grow? What light to one part of the system feeds the others?
It is interesting to me to think that not all trees or people in the system are connected to all others in a direct way. But they are all in the same system.
Is the deep calling to live the energetic pattern? Is it presence that creates the connection? Presence — sensing the field as the necessary condition for popping up or for nurturing our selves and our neighbors. Presence — as doorway into the pattern of living energy that seeks to create. It is in us. It is in the earth. It is in all living things. It is in other beings from other realms.
So, how do we support change?
– amplify the energy pattern of living things, always creating
– live in the stream created between people
– connect the system to more of itself
If a tree has no choice but to become a tree, what is it that we humans have no choice in becoming? We must become what?
Does a tree love its neighbor tree? Is love unique to human beings? Is love the contribution to the energetic roots that we humans uniquely can offer?
What am I on the edge of seeing here?
Aspens draw from earth nutrients, from the sky’s light and warmth. A link to grow is a wandering root. All together produces a tree that fits so beautifully into a forest. The forest provides exponentially more than the individual — oxygen, stability, shade, ecological home. People aslo draw from earth nutrients, from the sky’s light and warmth. The link is the wandering person? All together produces a being that fits so beautifully into a human forest? The human forest also provides exponentially more — a system capable of change, of creation.
