Perhaps a thousand years ago, a mother came to a daughter and told her what it was like to live and die. A mother tree came to her daughter and explained how to survive and the daughter listened without ears. 

Mother trees are old, mature trees that share excesses with surrounding flora. Carbon and nitrogen. Blood and breath. Their roots comprise the superhighway of communication between fungi, microorganisms, and rhizomes. Nerves scattered over her bone. They supplant seedlings, regardless of species, regardless of competition, with the components of life. In her roots, there are centuries—millennia—of biological knowledge. Which chemicals ward off pests, the patterns of weather, when to grow, when to die, what time of year the sun stretches longer, what a season is, what they are. A vast intelligence beneath layers of bark. She inhales and they exhale and it is creation. 

She is an educator. She is part of an immortal chain of mothers before her, stretching back before the evolution of mankind, all sharing the soil and speaking into it. Mother to daughter, tree to seed. I was not raised with community, in any sense of the word. There were people around me and we spoke and we parted and that was survival in that place. The growing, pulsating beast that consumed life and put it into uniform, orderly homes. Yards separating each house. Trees as an afterthought. And when I went to school, the ordeal was one to simply survive, not make a place in. Friends were those you sat by. Friends were those you stopped speaking to after graduation. I existed in isolation, seated beside ripped up forest, seeing only the limitations of my gaze. 

To mother trees, nothing can be the individual, everything was everyone and survival of the fittest was the banal thought of a man who did not know the microbiotic needs of his neighbor. When the storms come and one—an aged scarlet oak, strong and willful—rips up the ground as she falls, the saplings she has provided for, the ones ten years old and inches tall, will take her place and eat her body. This is her final gift to them. She imparts her love as she imparted her knowledge. Freely and alongside phosphorus. 

When I left that placeless town, the one that looked like all the others, full of nameless people and faceless cars, I knew everything I could no longer be. People, when given the space to never know you, will remain still. If I could not know them, I would know myself. Self-sufficient, I gave myself nitrogen and sunlight. I became my own ecosystem. 

Have you ever wondered why plants die in your house? Perhaps too little light and too much water, you’re loving it like a mother and you’re not its mother. You love it like a person. You speak a language and refuse to translate. You do not offer knowledge and nitrogen, you just keep drowning it. 

My ecosystem came to a new place with new people and we all speak the same language of newness. I redefine myself, impart phrases they have not heard, make observations they do not see and they call me family. This is the only community we know. This is the only way they know to love me. Like family. We do not know this ignorance is wrong. We do not know there is something more to have. But they grow into me and I find myself extending a hand, a root, a touch. They are a multitude. They find their way into my soil and I find myself in a stitching of roots, bound to a familiar earth. This biodiversity, this inhale and exhale, it feels like sleep. 

Mother trees watch the sun rise and fall and they send out words in a language of electric water. The whole forest watches the day pass with her, sending pleas and questions and warnings. They speak constantly. They sing. Roots touch, they inhale with the pulse of the earth. Everything is everyone and everyone is everything. 

They exhale.