Soul Medicine for Our Time

Aspens: Soul-Medicine for Our Time

The New Mexican and reporter Stacy Matlock are to be commended for the Sunday, September 20, front page story on SAD, Sudden Aspen Decline: Mysterious condition hits aspens in the West.

The timeliness of this attention to the aspen’s plight is synchronistic, as we locals and tourists alike—aspen lovers all, begin our annual ritual migration into the mountains. We seek the renewing refreshment of their golden beauty. I would like to offer a few additional perspectives to the New Mexican article that may further enhance our collective appreciation of this beloved local resource.

According to the Forest Service’s award winning video, Fading Gold: The Decline of Aspens in the West, Utah and Colorado have lost over 50% of their aspens and Arizona lost over 90% of theirs… in the matter of a few years. While local aspens are perhaps currently spared, SAD is as real as the plight of the iconic polar bear and as our own challenges of thrivability in a world of climatic destabilization.

Accurate perceptions of our circumstance are vital if we are to navigate the challenges of our times successfully. For example, “Aspens, on average, live only about 110 to 120 years….”

While this is generally true of the individual ‘trees’, stems or ramets as Botanists reference such clones, the larger and deeper story is one of wonder and awe. One tree in Colorado, for example, was recently dated at 300 years old.

And while the Aspen Basin ‘stand’ we see and enjoy from our city’s center, its current surface-stand configuration stimulated by a fire occurring near the turn of the 19^th century, the larger ‘mother aspen’ has likely been rooting around in the soil and rocks of the Sangres since the last ice age. An isolated aspen grove in the Davis Mountains of Texas is estimated to be 10,000 years old and there is no reason to believe our ‘mother aspens’ here are any less venerable.

Additionally, aspens are not only the most widely dispersed tree in North America they also comprise the largest known individual organisms on the planet. Walking among them is, literally, walking inside their body, the “wood-wide web” of their ‘aspen-body.’

So as a student of human resilience I welcome this attention to aspens, a species whose propagational success is hinged not only to environmental disruption but also to the interconnectivity of rooting into community. Seems like a humbled mankind, tired of fouling our own bed, might want to see what wild-wisdom we might learn from such an ancient being.

We are after all, individually and collectively, more like the aspens than we are different from them. Thus aspens, as mythic representatives of the tree of life, have much to teach us about what it means to be human, human beings.

Their trembling leaves sing ecological songs of relational intelligence, of the paradoxical co-existence between community and individuality, about the heart of resiliency in turbulent times, about what it is to be of one heart, one mind and one flesh—celebrating diversity.

Through this embodiment and celebration of both diversity and of Oneness, aspens model connectivity, belonging and wholeness. Thus they can teach a listening soul, for example, the perceptual agility of seeing the world from multiple perspectives, and of standing in relationship to fear as an ally rather than being its prey.

And in aspen’s struggle now to adapt to a changing world, they invite us also to open our hearts to the grief and grieving of our era: the dying and extinction of so many of our relations. The aspens are thus soul-medicine for our times for they sing too of strategies and opportunities for thrivability—in a world of turbulence.

So go take a hike in the aspens this fall. Listen to the gift of their song, and share yours.

Larry Glover writes about aspens and human thrivability at wildresiliencyblog.com, and is the Founder/Director of The Wild Resiliency Institute.