A warm welcome to new followers! I’m so glad you’re here. Longtime listeners might remember I told this story in podcast 28. Seeing Each Leaf. There was more to be said about the story, though, and I wanted to immerse myself in it again in light of what I’m writing about in my next book. Hope you enjoy!
I’ve been fascinated for many years by a story that an anthropologist told about when he was a doctoral student doing his fieldwork. He was living among the Yurok people along the Klamath River in northern California, studying Yurok education. He said that the Yurok people taught him in the same way as they would teach their own children, meaning, they almost never gave any direct explanations for anything. Yurok people expect children to watch the adults around them carefully and then take what they learn and do their own thinking. Explaining something, they say, takes away a person’s chance to learn it for themselves. It’s stealing, and stealing is against the law.
So it came as a surprise when one night an older Yurok man broke tradition and offered a direct teaching.
They were sitting beside the fire when the older man reached for a piece of wood and held it up. “What is this?” he asked.
“Piece of firewood,” the student said.
The man turned away and fell silent, looking disgusted. It was clear this was not a good answer at all.
So the student tried again: “It’s wood, a piece of a tree.”
The man’s face brightened a little; this was better. “And what’s a tree?” he prodded.
They fell silent; there was nothing more. He was letting the student do his own thinking.
But later that night the Yurok man said this:
When you can see each leaf as a separate thing, you can see the tree. When you can see the tree, you can see the spirit of the tree. When you can see the spirit of the tree, you can talk to it and maybe begin to learn something. Good night.
I first read this story many years ago, and it reminded me of when I was in graduate school, maybe about the same age as the anthropologist, and I too needed to learn something. And my learning too started with a tree.
I’ve told the story many times of how, when I was a child, I loved the tall weeping birch tree that grew in front of our house. And how, decades later, when I was living far away from the tree and it was coming to the end of its life, the birch tree paid me a special visit.
I was sick at the time with a chronic illness that had begun with a virus. For months my life had been on hold with brain fog and extreme fatigue. I was losing everything I knew about myself. I was a musician, but I couldn’t play music or sing anymore. I was a doctoral student, but I couldn’t read, couldn’t even comprehend the words on a page.
And then one day, alone in my living room two thousand miles away from the birch tree, it suddenly appeared. It rose up in my mind, strong and vivid, just as if I were sitting in front of it, as I had so many times when I was young. Except this wasn’t a memory. This was something different—more alive, more insistent, more present. More like the tree was right there with me.
I was quiet for some moments, wondering what was happening. Then slowly, slowly, the presence of the tree faded.
A few weeks later I’m talking with my brother on the phone, back in our hometown. Suddenly he says, “Well, we’re gonna have to cut down the birch tree. It’s got a disease or something.”
And then I understand. The tree had come to the end of its life. It had come to say goodbye.
But how can a tree communicate with a person? There is no place for such a thing among my people.
So in that season of illness, when I was losing so much of my identity, I had to shed yet one more thing: the worldview I was raised with—that most of us were raised with—that taught me that nature is silent. That nature is there for us human beings to act on. That we are the doers, and we can do what we wish to the others because they are always the receivers.
I had to lose my position of privilege. I had to become a receiver.
That experience was so foreign to my own culture’s way of thinking that it sent me looking for company. Did my experience make sense to anyone else? Eventually I found company, mostly among the worldviews of Indigenous peoples, who have no problem talking with trees. Many of whom recommend it, in fact.
I had to lose my position of privilege. I had to become a receiver.
And this story of the older Yurok man joined that circle of companions. As I have pondered the Yurok man’s teaching I have come to understand just how much the tree taught me in that one day.
Illness had stopped my graduate work for a time, but I was starting a different education.
I was beginning to learn from Earth.
The Yurok man spoke only three sentences. Three simple sentences, but I’ve come to think of them as a whole curriculum for Earth learning.
Here again are his words:
When you can see each leaf as a separate thing, you can see the tree. When you can see the tree, you can see the spirit of the tree. When you can see the spirit of the tree, you can talk to it and maybe begin to learn something.
One thing that jumps out at me right away in his words is a rather different view of spirits than the one I grew up with. Most of us today tend not to think about spirits except around Halloween, with all its ghosts and goblins. Because for most people, spirits and ghosts are pretty much the same thing. They’re the spooky things left over after people die. No need to pay much attention to them unless they cause trouble, like haunting a house. Or unless you have a big problem, like the little boy in The Sixth Sense did: “I see dead people.”
The Yurok man gives a different flavor to the word spirit. To him the spirit is the living person, not the dead one. And to be a knowledgeable human being, you need to talk with spirits. Especially the spirits of trees. Talking with trees, to him, is how you begin to learn something.
So how does he say you can talk with trees?
Here, again, is his first sentence:
When you can see each leaf as a separate thing, you can see the tree.
It starts, he says, by observing the tree. Seeing each leaf.
But what an assignment! How can anyone possibly do this? It is said that a mature oak tree has around a quarter million leaves. How do you possibly see each one?
Maybe it’s something like the way I observed the birch tree.
When I was a child I watched it in every season, in all kinds of weather. I knew how its small leaves turned bright yellow in autumn and sparkled in the sunlight against the slim white trunk. I knew how they curled at the edges and dropped to the ground, and I knew their fine crackling sound when I walked on them—a light crispy sound, different from the hefty crunches of the big maple leaves down the street.
I also knew how the tree would look the next spring—the precise shade of delicate yellow-green that the new leaves would wear. How on one spring day—maybe for only a few hours on that one day—those brand-new baby leaves, not even all the way open, would shimmer on their threads of stems so that each branch of the tree was draped in green silk. And all of the threads would flow together in the breeze like the gentle billowing of a tree-size shawl of the sheerest green chiffon.
I knew the tree, in other words, like we know each of our loved ones. We recognize the sound of their step on the stairs or the way they hold their shoulders when they walk. The more of their qualities and quirks we come to know, the more we can see the person.
And that’s when a real relationship can begin, when we can see someone clearly, in all their details, all their gifts and contradictions. It’s a rigorous process, and it can take years—maybe as long as seeing each of the quarter million leaves of an oak tree.
In other words, it’s a practice. And the Yurok man recommends doing it with a tree because true learning begins right here, he says, in the careful discipline of simply observing. Sitting with a tree. Getting to know each of its leaves.
It might take a lifetime.
And maybe it goes without saying—this practice happens in the physical world. It’s a practice of the senses—getting information first through the five senses. A Yurok view of knowledge and a Western view agree right here: knowing starts with observing the physical world, and observing it closely. Paying attention to all the parts. And respecting all the parts as separate, each part worthy in its own right.
Or, in the words of the Yurok man, “When you can see each leaf as a separate thing, you can see the tree.”
The Yurok man’s second sentence also holds a universe of meaning:
When you can see the tree, you can see the spirit of the tree.
After we’ve observed another for a long time and we can see the whole person, our relationship inevitably deepens. We might appreciate their more hidden qualities—their kindness of heart or their thirst for what’s right and good. We might catch a glimpse of their unique potential and path.
In other words, we come to see their spirit. How they are unique, how life sparkles through them in ways that are not like any other person. How it shimmers in their eyes or, if they’re a tree, in their spring-fresh shiny leaves. How life itself reaches out to touch us in the curve of that one’s fingers—or in the curve of their branches. We see their personality, their special flavor of being. How they always add up to more than the sum of their parts.
Spirit in this sense is the gift of life itself flowing through us; it is the heart of our beating heart, the breath filling our lungs, the blood coursing through our veins. Spirit is the force that breaks open a seed to release a root downward, and it is the gravity-defying force that draws water up through the fully grown trunk.
Spirit is life, and spirit is each being’s unique way of showing off that life.
Spirit in this sense is the gift of life itself flowing through us; it is the heart of our beating heart, the breath filling our lungs, the blood coursing through our veins.
When we can appreciate the whole being of another, we can see their spirit. Or, in the Yurok man’s words, “When you can see the tree, you can see the spirit of the tree.”
I notice too that in this second sentence, Yurok science takes a different turn from Western science. Though both ways of knowing start by observing the parts, Western science for the most part remains there, drilling deeper and deeper into the parts rather than moving outward again toward knowledge of the whole.
But Yurok science asks what all those parts add up to. In Yurok knowing, the parts lead toward seeing something whole and alive—a whole being, a living person. In other words, a spirit.
The Yurok man’s final sentence sums it all up:
When you can see the spirit of the tree, you can talk to it and maybe begin to learn something.
So at last we come around to learning. The Yurok man says it starts right here—after recognizing the tree as a spirit, a person. Because only then can we talk together.
Because conversation only happens between persons. For there to be talking, there have to be two, both of whom can speak. Objects do not converse; subjects do. As philosopher Thomas Berry famously said, “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”
Seeing the spirit of another does not leave us unmoved. It changes us. It opens the eyes of the heart so that we can see the other as someone different from us yet like us too, someone to converse with. Someone to learn from. We open to empathy.
And talking with a tree is the foundation of learning because it takes humility. We become ready to commune with this being who is so very different from us. When our hearts open wide enough to be humble, we make ourselves ready to learn.
And this is exactly what the Yurok man pinpoints as the missing piece of the young anthropologist’s education: he talks only with other human beings, which leaves him profoundly ignorant. He hasn’t even started to learn. If he can’t talk with trees, he can’t relate to them as members of the same community. He is cut off from knowing how to carry himself in a world that is full of trees and flowers and rivers and fish and oceans and clouds and air. He needs to commune with them in order to know how to share the world with them.
When our hearts open wide enough to be humble, we make ourselves ready to learn.
And right now he knows nothing. He thinks this precious piece of the tree is only wood for the fire. “When you can see the spirit of the tree, you can talk to it and maybe begin to learn something.”
Was the Yurok man exaggerating, saying that the young student knew nothing at all? I don’t think so. I think he was putting his finger on exactly where a Western education does not prepare us for life in the real world, the ecological world.
It teaches us to reduce every being to its parts, but then it leaves us lost in the parts. We never see the wholeness of other beings—their personhood or spirit. We never come around to appreciating how each being exceeds the sum of its parts. How a being acts in the world. How plants prefer to live close to some plants but not others. How trees in a forest choose to send their nourishments to some companions but not others. How animals enjoy lying in the sun or the shade. How rocks shape the foundations of this world. All this choosing and intending and experiencing and flowing with unseen forces is always more than a machine can do. It’s the glorious excess of being alive.
And turning our attention away from this glorious excess leaves us starving for spirit. Our hearts turn chilly when we focus only on the parts and forget the whole.
We never allow the other beings to change us.
We forget love.
In a world of things instead of persons, we don’t converse, we calculate.
Because machines cannot love. Only we who are more than machines, more than the sum of our parts, can do that—we who are flowers or forests or animals or soil.
Forgetting the spirit has led us away from loving our neighbors on Earth. And being cut off from love, we are unable to respect and collaborate with and honor those neighbors on Earth. We trample them instead of listening to them; we treat them as mere tools for lack of wonder and appreciation.
In a world of things instead of persons, we don’t converse, we calculate.
This is a fundamental mistake in perception, a grievous error in knowing. We are misperceiving the basic condition of life on Earth. We haven’t even started to learn yet.
I think the Yurok man had it exactly right: we need to take that final step of wisdom, the step that changes us: opening our hearts to the aliveness of others. Seeing their spirit. Becoming able to talk with them, becoming ready to learn.
Looking back, I see that when I was a doctoral student I was exactly like the young anthropologist: I hadn’t yet begun to learn. But chronic illness had humbled me, robbing me for a time of my ability to read and think and reason. I was more open, more ready to learn.
And I have the birch tree to thank for stepping in to begin my new education. This one tree taught me that not only can we love and appreciate trees, but that trees can remember and love us back. It taught me that the kind of learning that helps us reconcile with Earth is always rooted in relationship. In love. In the knowing that grows out of deep familiarity.
It changed the definition of knowing for me, from knowing-about to knowing-with-love. Knowing with wonder and appreciation. Knowing that changes your mind and heart.
In this way the birch tree taught me about spirit. About a world where all are powered by spirit. And how knowing-with-love gives us the ability to reconcile with the others of Earth and live in balance with them.
I’d like to close with a few lines from a poem by Joy Harjo, member of the Mvskoke Nation and former Poet Laureate of the United States. The lines come from her poem “Remember”:
Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Remember . . .
Remember.
Many of you, I know, have deep relationships with trees. Please feel free to tell us a story of you and a tree in the comments below. It’s always a good day to open the heart by hearing stories of trees and how they sustain us and talk with us.
For digging deeper
Thomas Buckley told the story of the Yurok man's teaching in an essay published in Parabola in 1979. That essay was reprinted as a chapter titled “Doing Your Own Thinking,” in I Become Part of It, edited by D. M. Dooling and Paul Jordan-Smith (HarperSanFrancisco, 1989), 36–52. We don’t know the name of the Yurok man because, as Buckley explained in his 1982 dissertation, though he lists his Yurok consultants by name, he does not link specific teachings with specific people because the people did not want to be named in this way. Buckley later revised his dissertation into the book Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850–1990 (University of California Press, 2002); see 89–90 for discussion of the Yurok educational system.
For more on the Yurok peoples’ intimate connection to the Klamath River and its salmon and the effects of colonization on their livelihoods and culture, see Brook Thompson, “The Familial Bond Between the Klamath River and the Yurok People,” High Country News, August 24, 2021. By 2024 four dams had been removed from the Klamath River, and Yurok environmental attorney Amy Bower Cordalis talks about what a healthy river and healthy salmon mean for her people in: “Four Dam Removals on the Klamath River, with Amy Bowers Cordalis,” Resources Radio, July 23, 2024.
Thomas Berry wrote many times during his life that “the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” You can find it in the final collection of his essays, Evening Thoughts (Sierra Club Books, 2006), 17.
Joy Harjo’s poem “Remember” comes from She Had Some Horses (Norton, 1983). Read the whole beautiful poem at Poets.org.
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