Trees Think We're Cute: Musings on Belonging

Last fall I visited my extended family in Oklahoma. These folks were very different from my immediate relatives — looser, warmer in some ways, more sprawling. I liked the feeling of wider connection, the sense of what family could mean when it moves beyond the tight nuclear unit I grew up in. Since my mom died three years ago I've spent a lot of time thinking about family, obligations, connections, and belonging. What we owe each other. What we long for. What so many of us never quite received.
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This is pretty classic Forest Mother territory — so I guess it's no surprise that in the seasonal wheel of Landscape of Mothers, early fall is Forest Mother time. This time around I've been sitting with what family actually means to me, and who is available to create the kind of family I want. Not the family I was born into, but the one I'm still, at this point in my life, trying to build

One of my friends told me recently that "family" is a tough word for her. She fears being treated like family — it's not a good thing in her experience. I have real sympathy for that. I've had a hard road with family too. But I think something is coalescing for me around care and kindness and togetherness — a growing sense that family is less about blood and more about how we show up for each other.

And yet. Some part of my mind will probably always wonder if I belong with the people I'm with. I think that's what happens when you grow up as an outsider in your own family. The questioning becomes a kind of constant background hum.

I sometimes feel envious of people who always felt that someone had their back, who had an uncomplicated sense of belonging to the people they were born to. That kind of grounding — being welcomed into a community as a baby, with many people wanting to see you grow and flourish — is something so many of us never had. We grew up under-mothered, even if we had parents who loved us. One or two people, no matter how devoted, can’t do what a whole village was meant to provide.

I used to think the lack of belonging I felt said something about me. That I was somehow adrift, not right, needing to work harder at being the right kind of person. But all the trying I did failed to make me feel like I belonged. It just wore me out and made me wonder if I belonged anywhere at all.

What I understand now is that the longing I felt — and still feel sometimes — isn't a personal failing. It's a signal. It's pointing toward something real that has been lost, not just in my family but in the broader culture. We have become more and more siloed. We live in smaller and smaller units, we are more socially isolated, and then wonder why we feel so untethered. The longing for belonging isn't weakness. It's the echo of what we were always meant to have.

My daughter recently sent me a podcast about trees and how they share information. She had to listen to it for one of her college classes and she knew I'd like it. It's a Radiolab episode called Tree to Shining Tree, and it made me want to go sit in the forest and feel into the network that is a living forest. It's more than individuals, more than even families — it's the knowledge that connection itself is what makes community.

Trees in a forest aren't just individuals standing together. They are deeply interconnected, sharing resources and information through vast root and mycelial networks. They warn each other of threats. They share nourishment across distances we can barely imagine. If you are a sensitive person you can go sit in the forest and almost feel it — the humming of movement underground, the sharing and communicating happening beneath your feet.

The trees will notice you while you're there. They feel you. I think one of the quietly healing things about sitting in a forest is that you can feel seen, but in a way that carries no expectation or obligation to perform. You just get to be there. Received as you are.

I heard somewhere that elephants look at humans as little fragile baby-like creatures. I don't know if it's true, but I love it. And I get the feeling trees do something similar — that they look down and say sweet things like "oh, she looks so tired, let's let her rest here" or "oh, what a darling little thing." That's what I imagine, anyway. And it makes me feel a little softer toward myself. A little more compassionate. For a moment, I feel gentle with myself in a way that's often hard to come by.

Maybe that's what intact community was always meant to do. Not to fix us or require us to perform our worthiness, but to receive us as we are, and in that receiving, remind us that we belong. The forest does it effortlessly. And I’m so grateful to lay at her feet.