Re-membering with Trees: A Practice for Black August and Always

“…[T]ransformational possibilities often emerge where we least expect them.” 

—Angela Y. Davis

This Black August, as a part of commemorating and uplifting the struggles of Black peoples—struggles to resist the racism, colonialism, and imperialism that seek to remove us from our humanity, separate us from source, decry and disappear our stories, harm our bodies, and suppress our ability to feel any way about anything, we remember. We remember our interdependence with each other and with the more-than-human world. We remember how to feel. We remember the freedom dreams—ours, those we’ve inherited, and those of our descendants. We remember how to listen. Yes, with our ears and our hearts, and with our entire beings, to the sacred belonging longing to be born into its fullness. The songs are everywhere. In the babies, in the elders, in the whisper-shouts of ancestors, of spirit,  on the wind, in the water, and in the trees. 

Many of us, as we continue to be engaged in strategies of blocking, believing, building, and being¹ across our movements for love, dignity, and justice, are actively in questions: How might I find some rest? How might we keep going? How might I prioritize among the many, many needs drawing my attention? 

Often when I am unclear or just plain exhausted, I find myself remembering the tree in the yard of my St. Louis childhood home that I would climb to find some peace. No one ever thought to look for me up there. I’d wait until they’d tired of calling for me outside and went back inside before I came down, hesitant to reveal my spot. It was how I came back to myself and readied for whatever was in front of me when I went in the house, to school, to church…to being and doing whatever was expected of little Black girls in 1970’s Missouri.

And now I invite you to pause. I invite you to listen for the messages in the trees. If you live in a place that is dominated by concrete, this does not mean you have to go to another place. Listening to trees is an ancient practice across the globe that has many names and can happen wherever there is a tree. While I’ve had the privilege of spending time in redwood forests and in the Rocky Mountains of Canada, the first message I heard from a tree was from one growing in a median in a parking lot in Baltimore. 

The practices I know the most about were taught to me by the trees themselves. For Jiridon²— the word for tree talkers in Mande lineages of Africa—it is widely held that there is no human apprenticeship. To learn, one must spend time with trees, and they will see to your learning and growth. 

Trees are often elders of the community. They have inhaled your breath. Witnessed your comings and goings and with whom-ings. They know things from the next block over and possibly the one after that. And possibly much, much farther. Often across many generations.

As a part of your remembering and casting forward this Black August, I invite you to journey for a spell with a tree.

When you see/feel/hear a tree that calls to you, go to it.

• Invite ancestors, if that is a part of your practice.
• Make an offering imbued with your spirit—water, tobacco, cornmeal, something that feels meaningful to you and can go back easily to the earth. If you don’t have anything, ask the tree what it wants, and you can always bring it back later. Sometimes I hear only that it wants to be remembered in my prayers.
• Connect to the tree first with your nervous system—breath, humming, touch… If you want to connect with touch, ask permission first. Tree bark and its integrity has different levels of importance and fragility at different times. If the answer is no or unclear, don’t touch it. Only yes means yes.
• Ask a question, which can simply be: What does spirit want me to know today?
• Listen
• Offer gratitude even if the gift you receive that day is silence.

Whatever you receive, consider finding or creating something to represent that message. Journal, pick up a rock or a fallen leaf, draw a picture… Look at daily. Consider sharing it with others to spread the gift. 

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¹ We need to respond to this moment where relational, structural, and institutional destruction, catalyzed by state attacks on individual and collective well-being, harm our communities and the powerful and beautiful work happening across the country to advance visions and practices of liberation in ways that plant seeds of a future of solidarity, interdependence, and mutual thriving as we tend to the now.

Among us, we need to be doing four things:

1. Block: defend and protect people, policies, rights, etc.
2. Believe: vision the future we want and be guided by it daily.
3. Build: bridge and deepen relationships with each other, with unusual partners,  and with ourselves. 
4. Be: tend to our well-being individually and collectively—in continuous connection with our multiple, simultaneous stories/wisdom, with our bodies, with source, and with our emotions—prefiguring the future, we want as much as possible in the present.

Change Elemental will be sharing more about this analysis of the moment in coming months.

² Learn more about Jiridon in Stephanie Rose Birds, A Healing Grove: African Tree Remedies and Rituals for Body and Spirit, and/or her recently updated, The Healing Tree: Botanicals, Remedies, and Rituals from African Folk Traditions