the trees are talking to each other

Written By Omnia Saed
​i've been going back and forth on how I wanted to start this post. that is, if i wanted to signal the start of the new year in any profound way and what, if at all, that acute passage of time should mean to us. after all, i started this newsletter as a meditation on movement, on the relationality of stillness to/ward justice, to/ward our collective conceptions of freedom, love, intimacy and the beyond. and a new year — in every sense — is a metaphorical insistence, a claim to the passage of time. it is, in many ways, the most bountiful movement of all. 

but if i’m being quite honest with myself, all i *really* want to do is to talk about trees. pear trees, in particular, which, before this moment i didn't know much about. but now I can tell you that there are 3,000 known varieties of pears worldwide, that a full size pear tree can grow up to 30 feet tall and 20 feet wide and in the spring they bloom — they bloom these beautiful abundant flowers that grip at every inch of skin.

time as we know girls is a construct but trees, TREES, in all their might and glory, gentleness and honor are ageless,  infinite,                   timeless.

"oh to be a pear tree — any tree in bloom!" writes Zora Neale Hurston, "With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!" and precisely in this moment where we are all preoccupied with a quest to dream, to enact and demand new world orders for ourselves and for one another, i find myself imagining the words in the worlds we have now and of the wonderfully kind and radical beauty of a pear tree. 

“there is compelling evidence,” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “that our ancestors were right — the trees are talking to one another.” and so, ​the more I close my eyes, the more i believe in a world that grants the pear tree sovereignty. 

this, of course, is not a new concept. in fact, many indigenous peoples have tried to litigate on behalf of trees, of bodies of water and the land. the Anishinaabek believe that the water of the Great Lakes should be seen as a sentient being, one in need of healing from historical trauma.

the experiences of water are not generally “expressed as trauma” but understanding that it has experienced trauma requires an approach that centers restoration, healing and mutual tenderness. it is a profound way of understanding the world and in many ways of understanding time.

“Water transcends time and space. In some respects, the waters we interact with in the present are the same waters our ancestors experienced, and the same ones that may be experienced by future generations in turn, should we take care of the waters sufficiently to ensure their (and our) future viability.” — deborah mcgregor, Indigenous Women, Water Justice and Zaagidowin (Love)

i admit, i have not always been the most perceptive/receptive person to my surroundings, to the environment, to the natural order of things. shoutout to my plants :( but recently I have been fascinated with the ecology and the poetics, the traditions that I have found in the study of trees, the ocean — and of course — the moon.

there is an indescribable feeling I have felt on some of my loneliest and saddest days looking across the skyline at the moon or at the sun as she boldly reclaims the sky in beautiful and brilliant refractions of light, shades of amber and gold, purple and blush. in those moments i am transfixed by the world. and yet, i realize now as i’m writing this, that i have never, not once, asked — if the moon, the sun or my darling pear tree — if on those days they too were perhaps just as lonely and sad as me. 

anyways, here are some other readings/sounds that touched my heart this week:

Omnia Saed
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