The Frostbitten Tree and the Lonely Oak

On Trees and the Nature of Free Will

I have been ruminating on questions of fate and free will lately. It’s very hard to say how much of our lives are shaped by our choices. Much of the time, we’re running on habits and other unconscious thought patterns. If you’ve seen the work of Kevin D. Mackay at all, you’ll know that, down to the most fundamental levels, our movements and posture work according to “conceptual mappings” of how our body functions. For most people these conceptual maps are completely unconscious. However they learned to do things growing up is how they do things as an adult, for the most part.

Working with Kevin has shown me that in order to change the way you move, you must change the way you see yourself, and subsequently the world. This, to me, is how one uses one’s free will. You must seek to unpack what you are and what you could be, understand what leads to what, and make a choice.

The Frostbitten Tree

A few blocks away from my house there is an open space with grass and a couple of trees. There a couple of different species of tree there, but one day when I was walking by, I noticed a tree that still had its leaves. At the time of writing, and of passing by, it’s late autumn/early winter where I live, and the temperature was dipping below freezing. This tree was in the process of dropping its leaves, but it was obviously much too late. This wasn’t the first cold snap we’d had. All the other trees around have either dropped their leaves, or at least changed their colors and readied them to fall. They weren’t hurt by the frost, but this tree was.

I also noticed how wildly this tree has grown. It has branched out close to the ground, and swelled its limbs outwards to capture as much of the open space around it for photosynthesis. A younger me would not have thought to remark on this, but I have come to understand that this means that this tree will live for a mere fraction of its potential lifespan.

A couple of years back, I read a book called The Hidden Life of Trees, and it changed the way I look at forests. There’s so much more going on between trees than you would think just from looking at it on the surface. They form very close bonds with each other, communicating and passing nutrients between each other through a connecting network of funguses. Old-growth forests create the conditions that allow for optimal growth for trees. Not just through the above mentioned relationships, but also because the conditions force young trees to grow patiently. There is little light to be had, so the sapling must grow up to get to it, without branching out too soon. Trees that branch out too early can’t grow as tall, and they are more vulnerable to storms. Trees that grow more slowly in low light conditions even have the advantage of creating a very dense, durable core of heartwood for themselves, which sets the foundation for future growth, allowing them to grow up and fill a gap in the canopy when it opens. This is also beneficial for resisting diseases. Dense wood is harder for pests to penetrate and gain a foothold in, giving the tree more time to wipe them out. Without the low-light conditions of the forest floor to encourage saplings to grow like this, you simply don’t get trees that live 500+ years.

This poor, frostbitten tree is an excellent example of what the book calls “street trees”. Forests are communities. Out alone in a little stretch of grass sandwiched between two roads, there is nothing and no one to teach a young tree to grow for longevity and health. This tree has had nothing. An orphan cast out into a cold, unmerciful world to find its own way. Is this perhaps why it has been so greedy, growing to maximize photosynthesizing as quickly as it can, and keeping its leaves green for so long? I’m no tree whisperer, so I can’t say. But this tree certainly seems to have been dealt a hard fate.

It has its own beauty, of course. Especially framed against the sky. But it will be a short-lived beauty, and it will never grow very high. Surely if there is an argument for fate and the futility of free will, our frostbitten tree is its greatest example.

The Lonely Oak

There is a power line that runs near my house. In the space that was cleared beneath it, a park has been built. It’s mostly soccer fields, but there’s also a walking trail and a playground, and a couple of other things. The park is sandwiched between a neighborhood on one side and woods on the other, but there are few trees in the park itself. Most are pretty small, but one oak in particular draws my eye. It’s an unusual tree in a lot of ways.

It’s an oak, but the trunk is ramrod straight, and the shape of the tree is much more like a conifer of some sort, an evergreen that grows straight into the sky with no deviation, it’s branches sloping down about it. Many deciduous trees that grow out of the forest don’t do this, they’ll split their main trunk into many branches and grow a canopy for themselves in only a few years after sprouting. Not this oak, though. It has a canopy now, but it has stubbornly maintained a straight main trunk for itself. There’s a…nobleness to this tree. It stands alone, and you can see that at times it has suffered, but it has not compromised itself for quick gains of growth.

This is what makes the lonely oak so curious. Without the constraints of an environment like the forest floor, most young trees are like our frostbitten one from above, all over the place, greedily growing as fast as they can to get to the sunlight as quickly as possible. The future integrity and maturity of the tree is traded for immediate gratification. But this oak hasn’t done that. It stands alone, and yet it stands tall and proud. You can see where it has been scarred. It had limbs lower on its trunk once that have been hacked off. The pain must have been terrible. But this has not cowed the tree, it has not broken it. It still stands tall, still grows straight.

How many people have grown up in terrible situations who have been able to come out of it like this tree has? I can count the names of the ones I know of on one hand. There are many, many more people for whom you must grieve and move on from. They are compromised, and there is really no chance of them overcoming this. They have lived as the frostbitten tree has, lost in the confusion of their upbringing. But the lonely oak shows that it doesn’t have to be this way. Choice matters. You are dealt a certain hand in life, that’s true, but you can still seek to grow straight and true anyway.

The Human Superpower: Death

Humans are far more equipped to choose than trees are. Once a tree begins growing a certain way, it is committed to that. It can’t suddenly decide that it was a bad idea to grow leaning to the left and straighten itself out. It can only try and correct that mistaken decision going forward.

We, on the other hand, can decide that we don’t like the way we’ve grown, that we don’t want to be the kind of person we are anymore, and we can undergo a symbolic death in order to be born anew, as someone who is ready to start over. Not to say that it’s easy. This process is described in the Major Arcana of the Tarot. Death is the 13th card, and proceeding after it are Temperance, the Devil, and the Tower. Just because you change doesn’t mean that you’re out of the woods. Your conceptual map of your own existence must be confronted. You must discover the reasons for your own follies in a confrontation with the Devil, which results in the Tower: a moment of complete collapse. Then you can begin to pick up the pieces, building a new, fresh life for yourself. If you have been the frostbitten tree, you can build yourself into a tall, lonely oak.

This is a hard thing to do though. It requires immense bravery, and the power of the Temperance card to help you hold steady and not fall to the temptation of the Devil, who would convince you to stay the way you are. This is why the lonely oaks of the world are so few and far between. Taking a moment to appreciate the majesty of such a tree, its strength and tenacity, feels like a gift, an inspiration. And maybe, for a moment, the tree isn’t so lonely.