If you need a role model for bravery, look up at trees.
Every autumn, they take the leaves that define them, that give them energy and life, and just drop them, confident that they will come back again.
It wasn’t always this way. As trees expanded to colder climates, they had a problem: ice. When the ground freezes, so does the water in it. There’s water, water everywhere but not a (liquid) drop to drink. Leaves evaporate water, so to conserve water, you need to lose the leaves. (Being leafless also helps conserve energy during the dark months and reduce storm damage.) They bravely know that even without their leaves, they are still trees.
I have thought of the bravery of trees often. Two summers ago, I got Covid for the third or fourth time, which left me with the whole-body energy-limiting illness of Long Covid. I took time off work to recover and then ramped back to full time, only to find that my body wasn’t well enough for it. So, I have stopped working to focus on recovery. I sit now, resting. I’ve had to give up a lot of things beyond work too that define me and give me energy and life.
A tree without my leaves.
Doctors prescribe “deep rest” for this illness to give your body a chance to heal itself. So at least once a day, I go outside, without my phone, to sit. Ideally I find a spot of sunshine by the canal where we live in London. You can call it meditation or mindfulness, but basically, I do nothing for as long as possible.
As I sit, the trees sit too.
And like me, they aren’t really doing nothing.
I’ve recently learned just how brave trees are, beyond just losing their leaves, in Tristan Gooley’s mind-opening book, How to Read a Tree.
Trees bravely seek light. They don’t do it in a calculated, conservative, bureaucratic way, though. They are entrepreneurial risk takers: they grow a hundred branches out to see which ones catch enough light. The ones that get sun grow leaves; the ones that find shade are cut off from the rest of the tree and die.
They are good at finding light. In front of me right now is a young tree sprouting branches straight up, into the rays of light that fall just above the building shadow, even in the low UK winter sun. Along the canal, the branches reach into the glorious open space of light above the water; in time the pull of the sunshine is so strong that their trunks lean toward the canal. You can see it along sidewalks, as trees stretch toward the bright middle of the street.
Many branches seek light out to the side. But just like it’s tiring to hold your arms out to your side, supporting branches sideways takes huge strength. So trees have a fix, which Gooley summarises as “more wood.” Look at where a large branch meets the trunk and you’ll see a reinforced “branch collar,” helping push or pull the branch up. This branch collar wood is so strong, apparently, that in olden days people used it for axe handles. I love the idea that trees bravely take on challenges, like growing horizontal branches, knowing they will grow strong enough to deal with it.
You can see the history of a tree’s bravery too, forever etched in its shape. Trees can only grow more or let bits die; they can’t move. And they usually only grow from the top; a branch that was eye level ten years ago will still be eye level today. So why don’t all trunks have those original low branches anymore? What happened?
Just like the shaded entrepreneurial branches, some branches that they needed early in life no longer serve them and are gone. Perhaps they were shaded by another tree. Or more likely, by their own newer branches. Trees are good at bravely letting go of things that no longer serve them.
They don’t totally forget them though. You can see the “eyes” where lost branches used to be along the trunk. Trees respect their own history.
The more branches grow up top, the more water and support they need from below. The trees’ solution? More wood! The trunk grows thicker every year to support more branches up above. So trunk width tells you more about the tree’s age than its height does: trees grow thicker as they get older. As a rough rule of thumb, a tree grows about an inch in circumference a year. Your hug diameter (wingspan) is about your height. So if you can just touch your fingertips together when you hug a tree and are 5’8” (68 inches or 175 cm), the tree is probably 60-70 years old. As trees age, they get stronger.
And they get particularly strong if they’ve been through some tough times. If something happens to the tree, especially to the apical branch that coordinates its branching behaviour, branch buds are at the ready to start all over again. Chop off the head of the tree, and they will sprout like crazy just near the base of the trunk as a Hail Mary. Wait a while, and you may see some of these crazy twigs grow into two or more trunks from the same root base. (When done on purpose this is “coppicing.”) Trees are unafraid to start over.
You can see this tree’s history of hardship just by looking at it, if you know how. Maybe as a baby sapling the tree got nibbled by a deer; so instead of one clean trunk, it sprouted a messy few. You can see its happiness too: if you come across a tree shaped so perfectly it looks like a child’s drawing, then it probably had an uneventful, happy childhood with lots of sun.
Our brave trees don’t stop when it’s easy. Trees go up to seek the sun, but the instant they break even a few inches above other trees or buildings, they are exposed to a huge increase in wind at their vulnerable top. The tree’s solution? More wood! Our brave trees don’t stop growing taller; instead they grow more wood around their base to secure themselves.
Sometimes, all that reinforcement – their thickening trunk, their thickening base, their branch collars – isn’t enough. The outside world just becomes too much and they get hurt. Maybe the wind became too much for it at some point; the tree might have splintered deep inside its trunk, which causes long vertical cracks. Or maybe a branch broke off under the weight of an ice storm. The tree’s fix? More wood! It will thicken the trunk around those injuries, keep calm and carry on. Now you know how to look, you can see these moments of profound bravery for the rest of their lives in vertical ridges or odd shaped reinforced lumps.
Being brave means doing things that are difficult even when you are scared or they are hard; being “ready to face and endure danger or pain”. It means preparing for the future, and responding to life as it happens. It means getting stronger in response to things being hard.
It is how trees seek light, knowing they will fail most of the times, but putting out hundreds of branches anyway.
It’s growing your trunk thicker each year to be able to take on more weight and support more life.
It’s seeking sunlight, even when that exposes you to wind.
It’s about reinforcing your base when you finally reach so high that you are exposed to those winds.
It’s letting go of branches that helped you in your earlier life, and recognising when they no longer serve you.
It’s being unafraid to start all the way over when it’s clear that things aren’t working out.
And it’s confidently letting go of the things that define you most for a time, knowing that, when it’s all over there will be a spring again.
Aabservations 