The woods surrounding my home are filled with popple trees. Popple is a colloquial word that has been in use for more than a century in the upper Midwest to denote several species of whitish-greenish barked trees. It includes some aspens and some poplars and birches. In winter they line up sentry-like, hundreds of them, dancing in the ever-increasing midwestern winds. I love the way they sway in unison; I love the color variations of the bark and how “far the stems rise, rise until ribs of shelter open” to quote Denise Levertov.
I adopted the image of these trees in meditation to remind me and bring me back to my center, to my deepest self “which for convenience I call God,” to quote Ettie Hillesum. It was not until after I began to use this image that I was amazed to learn how trees communicate, through root systems, sending messages to each other, warnings of insect invasions, forest destruction, coming storms. The image of these trees, the mass groupings of them, so close together, came to represent for me a place of peace and harmony, of connection to the universe, a breathing union with life itself. “To hear the multiple silence of trees. The rainy forest depths of their listening.” Levertov, again.
Listening. Perhaps the most important thing humans do on this earth. This credited to Ettie.
Then I learned that there is a forest of aspens that makes up the largest organism on Earth. This forest and its endangered status are discussed by Forbes and PBS among many others. Pando is the scientific name for this organism, ‘the one-tree aspen forest in Utah made up of over 47,000 trunks, and millions of leaves, connected through one root system.’ (https://pandopopulus.com/pando-the-tree/)
It is described as a quaking aspen clone of 47,000 stems, as perhaps the world’s oldest, heaviest thing, estimated to be 80,000 years old.
Again, from pandopopulus:
Above ground, Pando appears to be a grove of individual trees, like any other grove. It was overlooked, for years. But underground everything is connected by a single and vast root system. It is one tree. A one-tree-forest.
Pando is a fitting symbol of our common and threatened life together, and our ability to endure.
Former First Lady of California Maria Shriver puts it this way: “Pando means I belong to you, you belong to me, we belong to each other.”
I am choosing not to focus on the possible threat that exists to Pando, or to all of us on the planet, but to hold the ecstatic possibility of such an organism along with the constant dangers of human forgetfulness, in both hands together, both parts of our evolution from here to there.