I befriended my first tree

when I was a tiny, skinny, fawn of a girl.

April 23, 2025—waning moon in Pisces

Loves,

Remember the footnote in my last post when I said “Not told just to humans, told to any being in our ecosystem. But that’s another story.”? Not surprisingly, a few of you asked. Here’s a bit more about that.

“Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.” -

Robin Wall Kimmerer

I befriended my first tree when I was a tiny, skinny, fawn of a girl.

He was a white pine standing three stories tall, waving and whispering at me from the corner of our house. (Yes, “he” is anthropomorphism, but “it” feels too impersonal and this tree felt like a kind and beloved uncle to me.)

I loved resting in his branches and listening to his needles murmur. I loved that I still smelled like wind and sun and resinous earth long after I climbed down. I loved the sticky tattoos his sap left on my skin. They felt like a secret language just between us. I loved how I felt safe and loved in his branches.

I remember seeing him bend and sway nearly to the ground during a fierce summer storm and discovering a visceral understanding of surrender woven with strength and persistence. In later years when the weight of life bent me nearly to the ground, those wordless insights encoded in my cells kept me from breaking.

Sadly, I don’t have any photos of my white pine friend, but these are some friends from the ecosystem where I currently live. Their stories are also life-affirming.

But it was the stories we whispered into the air between his branches that truly interwove us.

I don’t remember how or why I started telling this great murmuring tree what was in my child heart—how I was afraid or lonely or bewildered. I think it simply made sense that I should whisper back to him since his needles were always whispering stories to me.

Even as I grew beyond climbing into his branches, I would lean my forehead against his trunk and quietly share stories about my life and listen for stories about his.¹

For reasons of roots and foundations my human family felled my friend a few months after I left home to attend college, making this beautiful wind-singing tree an ancestor. I recently wrote this poem (definitely a work in progress) about our friendship:

1.
i never heard the 
cracking, crushing 
finality of your fall.

just the word 
felled
public-phone tinny

and me unspooling 
across the floor of the 
dark dorm hallway.

i thought i’d lost myself
when your body hit 
that hard clay soil. 

through the following
endless
year

your deep-delving roots
were the only part of us
still upright and anchored.


2.
you were my first friend.
a secret-keeper.
the clear-eyed one.

your resinous heart
cohering my fragile
overwhelmed self.

i was the one 
who heard your 
wind-riding voice.

who believed you when you said
together, we are.
i remember you once told me

the earth under your feet is precious.
so are the feet—and the unutterably
courageous child who wears them.

my branches. your arms. 
my heartwood. your heart. 
inextricable.

it is our kinship
and our willingness to wear it
that defines us.


3.
our kinship
and my joy at wearing it
defines me, still.

decades on 
aging fingers tangled with 
soft green needles

i feel your
wind-riding voice
together, we are.

together, we are.

After losing my friend, I discovered that I could befriend other trees. Also boulders, colonies of moss, butterfly filled meadows, streams, tide pools, and hearty dandelions inhabiting sidewalk cracks. But those are other stories.

May you love and be loved by the ecosystem where you live. May you share many, many stories together.

Gently,
Tracie
tracienichols.com

1. I use the word “listening” here, but this listening involves my whole body, not simply my ears.