Climbing is my Meditation
Casual encounters with Trees (and a careful critique of the Mindfulness Hype) --- [Estimated reading time: 35 min.]
I have been climbing for as long as I can think. Longer than that, actually. Even before my conscious memory begins, I already climbed – one might perhaps even say I was born a climber. Once, when I was about one year old, I attempted to climb the wooden high chair my parents used to place me in during meals. Not yet having developed a sense of basic physics, I was entirely ignorant of the peril that would await me halfway up, and, for the first time in my life, my ambition to reach greater heights got the better of me. During this fateful ascent, as soon as the center of our combined mass started to shift upwards, the chair tipped over and I fell down. I broke my tiny leg that day, and spent the next few weeks dragging an encased leg behind me while crawling around – but I’m proud to say that I haven’t broken anything while climbing since.1
The few times we visited zoos during my childhood, by far the most fascinating and exciting thing for me was to watch the monkeys climb. How effortlessly they ran up vertical structures, how elegantly they swung through the enclosure, and how long they could hang from one arm! Many years later I would learn that, according to the Chinese zodiac, I was born in the “Year of the Monkey.” And while I’m not fully convinced that there is anything in particular that would unite people whose otherwise only commonality is that they were born in the same year,2 it always felt like a strange confirmation – perhaps my conscious mind searching for justifications for my subconscious (i.e. instinctual) preferences.
Growing up, I was always climbing – much to the dismay of my mother. If I could climb trees and eat fruit each and every day, my life would be perfect, I often thought when we visited our grandparents and raided their fruit trees.3 Fast forward two decades, and I climb trees almost every single day. We are planting a Food Jungle, a hyperdiverse, food-producing ecosystem that resembles a forest. This means not only that there is plenty of tree fruit to harvest and branches to prune, but all climbing plants we cultivate – whether beans, vine spinach, loofahs, or yams – are allowed to climb into the surrounding canopy. The areas in which we grow vegetables are flanked by shrubs and trees on all sides, so even the otherwise simple task of harvesting some vegetables for lunch for us often involves climbing.
People sometimes make fun of us for this, and say something like “those two only want a handful of beans to make some spicy bean salad (ตําถั่ว) and they already have to climb into the canopy!”
When I was still living in the countryside of Southern Thailand, I became known as “the white guy who climbs trees”4 in the village. Some people even gave me the nickname ลิง (ling; “monkey”), which – much to my dismay – didn’t stick because it’s considered slightly derogatory (which I don’t mind in the least). I was often called to help local villagers harvesting fruit or pruning their trees. These days, climbers are hard to find. Most people simply don’t like taking unnecessary risks,5 so anything that can’t be reached with bamboo poles is often left unharvested. I started harvesting durian, petai bean, betel nut, coconut, and a variety of fruits for some of the villagers, and was usually paid a share of the fruit. When I took care of a mixed fruit orchard that had been left fallow for ten years, I climbed trees to prune and harvest pretty much all day, every day for over a year.
The weird thing is that I don’t know a single thing about what is usually considered “climbing” in this society. I know exactly three knots, and they are all I ever use.6 I don’t know how to tie an alpine butterfly or a clove hitch, or even how to use a harness, secure another climber, or how to rappel. I can count the times I’ve visited indoor climbing halls on my fingers, and all that dates back to my high school days. I don’t understand the difficulty levels of climbing routes, and know none of the specific vocabulary. Apart from maybe a rope or two (to secure dropping branches or lower buckets to the ground) and occasionally a scarf tied around my feet, I don’t use any gear whatsoever. I’ve never climbed “professionally,” let alone competitively.
Now what kind of climber does that make me, one might ask. But does any other primate need safety harnesses, chalk powder, funny-looking shoes and boulder training to be able to do one of the most natural things for our order?
Ever since I was a child, climbing trees was one of my favorite pastimes. I climbed trees out of boredom, to impress friends, and – of course – to harvest fruit. But compared to the giants of the world’s rainforests most European trees seem tiny.
Tropical trees were initially a real challenge. Most older trees are unbranched until a considerable height, and their diameter often makes the first few meters a strenuous exercise (that sometimes has to be bridged by ladders). In my first two years here I trained in the forest orchard of a friend, a French guy called Birdee who used to be a “proper” climber (but has since become too old for such adventures). I scaled rambutan trees, harvested longkong, safou, milkfruit and cacao, and – secured by a safety harness – clambered up the first few large petai bean trees of my “career.” With the latter (one of the canopy/emergent species in his food forest), Birdee insisted on using the harness, which I found rather inconvenient and cumbersome since you always have to keep part of your mind occupied with this rigging. But after those first baby steps I’ve only ever climbed “free solo.” Ninety-six percent of the time trees, three percent rocks and mountains, one percent ladders.
If you live as isolated as we do, you have plenty of time to reflect back on your life, even when you’re only in your thirties. One pivotal moment in my life was choosing the two-week internship we had to apply for in one of our final years of high school. I chose the Botanical Garden of Munich, worked with an enormous collection of plants and marveled at the humid onslaught of vegetation in the palm house, so I became a tropical plant collector (of sorts). The other option would have been to work as an arborist and prune trees. Sometimes I think that if I had chosen differently, I might have enjoyed this sort of work so much that my life could have taken an entirely different trajectory. Maybe I would have finally found at least some purpose in climbing trees for a living – despite the rather cumbersome “German standard” assortment of safety equipment and power tools.
Maybe you have heard of the hipster term ikigai before, a Japanese word to describe something like “the umami of jobs.”
If there is anything for me that resembles ikigai, it would surely be climbing trees. No matter if for the expressed purpose of pruning or harvesting fruit, or simply for the fun of it or to catch a glimpse of the land surrounding me, there are very few things in life I enjoy as much. When there is good climbing work to do, I look forward to it like a kid before Christmas – it’s the last thing I think about before going to bed and the first thing on my mind in the morning. As soon as I open my eyes, my conscious mind springs into motion and all I think about is the climb of the day – it’s impossible to fall asleep again.
There is a majestic Petai bean tree in a friend’s garden, so beautiful and well-shaped that I can’t help rhapsodizing and complimenting it year after year, to the point of drawing ridicule from my friend. “It’s just a tree, not your girlfriend!” he always laughs.
The first junction is about four meters off the ground, and since our friend has a long ladder, I usually use it for this first part. After that, the branches are spaced just far enough apart for me to reach them, and anyone only slightly shorter than me would have serious trouble in some places. There are two main branches forming the crown, and the most risky part of the climb is the crossover from one half of the crown into the other – they are too far apart to grab directly from one into the next, so one has to let oneself fall forward and grab the next branch as soon as it’s within reach. (In practice it is less dangerous than it sounds, though.)
I look forward to harvest day ever since the first pods form, and I visit the tree several times a month to check on the progress. When harvesting petai beans, I use a long pole with a small sickle and a piece of wire attached to it in a half circle. The pods are hanging on the outmost branch tips, and just cutting them off would mean that they get shredded to pieces as they fall through the underlying vegetation. So you have to bring the U-shaped wire through one of the pods first, before cutting off the whole bunch.
The individual bunches of petai bean pods are then placed on a rope that connects the center of the petai tree crown and one of the lower trees around, creating a sort of primitive ropeway for the precious jungle fruit.
It’s just as much fun as it sounds!7
Without wanting to sound too pretentious, I’ve shinned up +10m coconut palms that people couldn’t even reach with the long sickle pole used for harvesting oil palm fruit. I’ve cut down entire betel nut palms with nothing but a scarf wrapped around my ankles and a hand saw, and carefully dropped 2m sections without hitting any of the smaller plants surrounding them. I’ve taken down rubber tree branches as thick as my leg that were hanging so far over a friend’s house that they blocked the satellite dish of his TV, without any damage to the fragile roof.
Unfortunately, there is extremely limited video footage of those endeavors, so you’ll have to take my word on that. I have a strong belief that the mere subconscious awareness of being recorded influences and changes ones behavior (often quite unwillingly) and results in more daring (and thus dangerous) behavior.8 Only when I’m not being filmed am I able to focus on the task at hand and stay fully present in the moment, paying attention to the wind, the sounds, the center of my balance, my grip, and the things the tree tells me.
And since I don’t plan on dying too prematurely, I always put safety first – even without harness & ropes. Although a fall from high enough could surely be a merciful death, a fall from only slightly lower could have much more devastating consequences. Being paralyzed or even just unable to move my body as I like is much scarier than death itself to me.
(Rare footage of me climbing a coconut palm back in 2016, when my partner and I visited a marine National Park and got thirsty. The full video is over three minutes long, since it takes a while to twist off coconuts with one hand.)
Yet I strongly feel that the only safety I need is my body & mind. When conditions are even slightly off, I simply don’t do any challenging climbing work. If a tree is too slippery after a day of rain, I’d rather wait another day than to take unnecessary risks. And if I don’t feel one hundred percent up to the task (like later in the day, or when I’m getting tired), I simply stop. Knowing your limits is essential in this field of work.
In the climate-fiction I occasionally write, the members of the “treeclimber guild” are the unsung heroes of the story, tree-scaping the entire area into one giant Food Jungle, artfully sculpturing impervious multi-species windbreaks tied together with living vines against the catastrophic typhoons, and harvesting the peoples staple foods – almost all of them tree crops.
So, what’s the big deal? Why this fascination, no, this obsession with climbing?
I’m one of the people whose mind is racing at almost all times. Other people might have moments where they don’t consciously think about much at all, but not me. I am in a near-constant, never-ending conversation with myself, and I’ve never even perceived this as a problem, or something that I’d want to change. The inner dialogue I have is usually rather pleasant – or, at the very least, interesting enough not to perceive it as a burden.
Yet for some people, the constant stream of thoughts can be overwhelming at times, and they seek a refuge from the steady mental outpour. This is where many people discover meditation.
Over the years, I’ve found out that climbing large trees is actually the closest I get to a meditative, fully-immersed-in-the-present state of mind, where I “get in the zone,” block out the rest of the world, and find myself completely in the moment. Just me, the tree, the wind, and the simple task at hand: obtaining food, pruning branches, or simply enjoying the view and the fresh breeze.
In those moments, when I’m high up in the canopy, the world seems to expand spatially, but simultaneously shrinks perceptually, as I stop thinking about what will happen tomorrow, next week, next year or next decade, and about what is going on in other provinces, countries and continents. I also stop thinking about other people, except maybe for those on the ground at the base of the tree I’m climbing.
Most people in this part of the world enjoy chatting almost constantly while working with others, even when climbing trees. Usually – despite not being particularly good at it – I don’t mind this practice at all, and I’m perpetually perplexed by the social skill required to keep an (often rather pointless) casual conversation going for hours at a time, never really saying much of real substance, but instead idly exchanging gossip peppered with frequent jokes.
Climbing is, in most instances, an act of solitude for me. Although one is of course never really alone – after all, you’re embracing a living being that’s many years or even decades old – it does feel more like taking a break from being around other humans and the animals one encounters as a ground-dweller. Completely in the moment, I’m sometimes startled to see a bird land on a branch close to me, eyeing me with her head cocked, reminding me that I’m the intruder here, the one who left his two-dimensional world to venture towards the heavens, a realm usually reserved for birds, bats and bugs.
Another thing that climbing trees does is that it changes your perspective, and gives you a much better overview of the real world around you.
You can look around much further than if you stand on the ground, and you’re the tiny center of your own small world. You connect landmarks, see places from a different angle, and put spatial relationships between places into perspective, creating a mental image of the landscape that looks very different from Google Maps. The landmarks connecting this map are individual trees (often large forest giants that stand out from afar), orchards, hills and other natural landmarks – not roads, gas stations and businesses.
If we’re talking Spirituality for a moment, I steadfastly believe we can feel the presence of the trees in those moments – and sometimes they speak to us. Each time before I climb a large tree, I touch the trunk with my forehead and say a small greeting and prayer, in which I state my intentions, give thanks (or apologies if pruning is my mission), and ask for protection in exchange for keeping up my side of the basic interspecies code of conduct.9
The tree tells me when I step on a branch that won’t support my weight. If you listen carefully, almost all tree species’ branches will make a slight clicking or cracking sound when you’re too heavy for them – and this is often the only warning you get, so it’s good to pay close attention.
Some tree species don’t warn you, though, and you’ve got to be a lot more more careful with those. Many legumes (like Leucaena or Parkia) and some softwood trees simply snap without prior warning, but those are usually the exception. Most trees care about your safety and want to give you a chance to correct your footing, since you being more careful also means that they get to keep their branches.
Once up in the tree, both my mood and my general mental state change immediately. Even though I’m sweating and straining, I’m surprisingly calm in my thoughts. I sense a strange but persistent feeling of comfort and inner peace, and I feel at one with the world, albeit only as a vanishingly small part. Among the gentle giants of the rainforest, we humans seem tiny and insignificant – a humbling (and thus necessary) experience.
This profound feeling has been with us for a long time, long before we even became humans. There was a time when trees meant abundant food, habitat, playground, and safety from predators, and this time is still with us, nestled cozily within the architecture of our brain. The more deep-seated, ancient parts of the brain are a remnant of that time that we still carry with us today, a bridge between our distant past and the present, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they glow up during an act as fundamentally important and ancient to us as climbing.
And inner peace seems to be in especially short supply these days.
Over the years, many people have offered me (often unsolicited) spiritual advice and tried to persuade me to start meditating, often implying that they think I could really use it. For the record, I did experiment with meditation in my first two years here in Thailand, on recommendation of the woman who ran the local shrine I used to frequent. Apart from her, no Thai Buddhist has ever tried to convince me to meditate, let alone convert me – in most cases, the people who display the strongest missionary fervor are not people who were raised Buddhist, but those who adopted certain beliefs and practices rather recently. To put it even more directly, most people evangelizing about the (scientifically proven!) benefits of meditation were wide-eyed Westerners in loose linen shirts and harem pants who had just completed their first meditation retreat.10
We even have a running gag about the need of every permaculture project these days to offer daily courses in “meditaaaation and yooooga,” the starter pack for spiritually empty Westerners – Ghosts without Shrines.
Now seems a good point to make clear that I have nothing against meditation (or yoga) itself. It helped many people in my social circle through difficult times, and it seems to be quite effective for some.11 Moreover, I called myself a “Buddhist” for the majority of my teenage years. Buddhism started to fascinate the 14-year-old me for the same reason Communism did – it seemed like the alternative to Christianity and Capitalism, the predominant two value systems that I understood quite well to be fraudulent and fraught with errors, misconceptions and downright delusions, even at that tender age. Little did I know.
What follows now is not intended to offend anyone. I would never consider myself to be anything even remotely close to an expert on Buddhism, but I’ve experienced its “lived” or “applied interpretation” for quite a while now. Consequently, the following is not meant to be a serious – let alone comprehensive – critique of Buddhism or Meditation itself, but merely some personal thoughts (that are nonetheless rather critical). Since open critique of Buddhism is an excellent way to get Thai “Netizens” to cancel the living bejesus out of everyone who dares to offend perceived “cultural sensibilities,” allow me to hide my careful but crude critique of some Buddhist practices and beliefs in the wider context of my own experiences with mindfulness or meditative states of mind in general.
These days, I don’t quite get the point of Western fetishization of Eastern “wisdom traditions” anymore, especially of meditation and mindfulness – living in a Buddhist country for over a decade has been a sobering experience. If those techniques were so superior, and their power to “awaken” us or let us “transcend” so profound, then surely cultures that practice meditation could be expected to be a bit wiser in regard to a few key scourges of civilization, like patriarchy, dominance hierarchies in general, and the inherent overexploitation (and hence destruction) of the ecology it is embedded in and dependent on.
Cultures in which meditation is (relatively) widespread as a practice, like Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and India, have been at it for thousands of years, yet they still believe humans are “superior” to other animals, vast chasms between social classes and rampant inequality are not only natural but necessary for us humans, and women are “less worth” than men.12
There can’t be that much wisdom to be found within yourself, if after over 2,500 years you still haven’t figured out that beliefs like this are nonsense.
If you allow me to be straightforward for a moment, to me meditation often seems like an act of separation, of capsuling oneself off from the web of relations that sustains us, regardless of what meditators claim. You retreat into yourself, instead of immersing yourself in the living world that flows through you and that you are an inherent part of, no matter how much you try to escape its firm embrace.
Seeing is the main sense with which we perceive our environment, so how much can we expect to learn about Life with our eyes closed? What else can we expect to encounter but a reflection of our own inner world? Surely, there are some important lessons to be learned about ourselves and our psyche, yes, but little more than that.
Utilizing introspective alone can only teach you so much, because it’s simply too difficult to see through – and detach oneself from – the biases of one’s (civilized) culture, much more so than to imaginarily detach yourself from your physical body through meditation practices.
Moreover, meditation (as it is commonly practiced) is a product of civilizations, anthropocentric societies that worship human-like gods and regard us as vastly more important than “animals” – a common derogatory term in civilized languages all around the globe. No hunter-gatherer culture I’ve ever studied did anything even remotely like mindfulness meditation on a regular basis, so it can’t be something that humans have a natural need for – it seems more like a response to certain circumstances and social conditions.
Especially the focus on “emptiness” and “nothingness” has started to irritate me increasingly over the years. Why try to escape Saṃsāra, the Wheel of Life? Isn’t the whole point of Life to be a part of this swirling chaos of infinite, beautiful, frightening, awesome, and profoundly sacred cycles within cycles (within cycles)?
And, as always, cui bono? Who really stands to benefit if we retreat into our inner world, trying to attain peace and fulfillment despite unfavorable external conditions? Who would like to see us prepping for the afterlife instead of addressing the root causes of our problems and trying to change our conditions in this world?
It is important to remember that all world religions are world religions for the precise reason that they can be interpreted in a way that justifies hierarchies and massive inequalities. Virtually all belief systems that reinforced a more egalitarian approach to social organization have been eradicated by their more powerful “civilized” neighbors, either through assimilation (Buddhism) or through outright extermination (all the others). Only those that can justify the existence of lords and kings prevailed.13
If you’re rich, it’s a “gift from God,” or you made enough merit in your past life that you were rewarded with wealth in the present one. If you’re poor, well, you deserve it. You must have been a real asshole in your past life, and now you suffer the consequences. It’s your fault, and resistance is futile.14 You’re told that life is suffering, the world a “vale of tears,” and the only way we can escape it is through death.15
Ronald Purser makes a similar argument in his book McMindfulness – How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality.16 In his view, mindfulness meditation and the alleged “revolution” it sparked in the business world have led to a hijacking of the concept by corporate interests, who are intent on telling us that the real problem is not the dystopic hellscape they’ve so diligently helped to shape, but instead our thoughts. If we could just quiet our minds, then we could simply accept all the stress, anxiety and suffering that arises as a result of living through Peak Civilization (and the concomitant Peak Alienation). Mindfulness is thus adopted as yet another marketable self-help strategy that capitalizes on people’s suffering without addressing (or even questioning) the underlying causes for all that misery – all the while promising to make workers “more productive” and “efficient.”
Moreover, the contamination of humbler ancient spiritual traditions like meditation by contemporary hyperindividualist narcissism often boils down to “I don’t give a fuck about the outer world, the most important thing is that I am at peace.”
Instead of trying to make ourselves comfortable within our own little cage, why don’t we work towards tearing down fences, walls and borders entirely, both in the metaphorical and literal sense? Why don’t we start preparing for the time after the crumbling Empire around us comes crashing down, instead of trying to make ourselves more comfortable in its tightening grip?
How about goal-driven action instead of passive indifference?
I know that much of the above could be picked apart by anyone even vaguely familiar with the actual Buddhist scriptures, and it might seem like I’m merely an ignorant simpleton throwing around opinions about things that are clearly above his pay grade. But if “corporate mindfulness coaches” are entitled to an opinion, then so am I.
And, as I said, I understand perfectly well why the (temporary) escape hatch meditation provides seems so attractive to so many, and I don’t refute that it can be an effective instrument for psychological self-help and emotional healing. Today’s world is simply too overwhelming for our poor primate brains, which evolved for a much slower life in tight-knit kinship groups, embedded in an animate landscape full of meaningful relationships – not in dense aggregations of wary strangers, isolated from all other Life and forever trapped in various cages of concrete, plastic, steel and glass.
It is just natural to look for relief.
So what has all this to do with climbing? One of the main reasons why people meditate (and at the same time the main method being employed) is the slowing down and quieting of the conscious mind. Other reasons are to try to be fully present in the moment, and to reduce anxiety. The very act of climbing trees is able to accomplish all that for me, often without me even making any conscious effort. I’m sure many readers have similarly mindful subsistence-related activities, like scything grass, cutting firewood, weaving, or processing fruit.
Climbing is pretty much the opposite of sitting around with your eyes closed, but – at least for me – it achieves surprisingly similar goals.
The whole detour above merely points to the conclusion that meditation, while certainly being a useful tool in some situations, is no revolutionary or groundbreaking invention that needs to be spread far and wide, nor does it imply that everyone will benefit from it. The reason why we’re so listless, lonely, disconnected, alienated and stressed is that we have created a world that is not only at odds with but diametrically opposed to the reality we evolved for and expect to encounter at birth. Instead of trying ways to adapt to this ”unnatural,” evolutionarily novel world, I propose it would make a lot more sense to go about and actually try to change the things that bother us, not explore ways to minimize their impacts on our own psyche.
Meditation alone won’t save even the smallest fraction of the (non-human) world. And if we wait for even half of the people in the world to start meditating, we’ll likely wait forever.
In the social and ecological environment we evolved to inhabit, our “Evolved Nest,”17 there is little need for mindfulness trainings and daily meditation practice. Life is already filled with small rituals, sacredness is acknowledged constantly, and people remain immersed in the present at almost all times. Simple subsistence and household routines can be practices in mindfulness, although they might not even be perceived as such by us moderns – brainwashed into believing that lowly tasks should be done by slaves, servants or machines, we tend to view chores as a burden.
But maintaining the Sacred Cycles of Life is the best mindfulness practice I can imagine.
You’re hungry, you gather and cook food, you eat it, and then you’re hungry again. You eat, you do the dishes, you eat again, and the dishes are dirty again. You gather firewood, make a fire, and the firewood is gone, so you go out again. You plant a seed, tend the plant, nurture and love her, and then she dies and you collect the seed again. You cut a branch, harvest the fruit, the tree makes a new branch, and when it bears fruit you cut it again. We cycle through the seasons and adapt our daily lives accordingly.
For me, climbing is one such practice. My conscious mind quiets down, my scope of awareness widens, and my focus becomes razor sharp. Sometimes, I even learn a thing or two about the world around me.
Harvesting mangosteen is probably the easiest climbing-related task, since mangosteen trees are by far the ones that are easiest to climb – and it’s virtually impossible to fall down from one. They sprout an abundance of neatly arranged horizontal branches that are more fool-proof to scale than any ladder.
After a few seasons, you remember each tree as an individual with whom you form an increasingly intimate friendship. You have a certain technique to swing into the lowest branches, and from there in you remember the best paths through the branches. It’s both like coming back to a familiar place and like meeting an old friend – and you even start liking some trees more than others.
While I’m up in the tree, I suddenly realize that I’m flowing in between the branches like a liquid suspended in zero gravity, from fruit to fruit, in a way that unwittingly reminds me of the calm movements of Tai Chi. I bend my knees and lean backwards, like Neo dodging bullets, and move from one to the other side of a branch before pulling myself up again. I stretch out while diverting my weight as evenly as possible between the two branches I stand on and the one I hold on to above me. I carefully lean forward, stretching my entire front, and reach out with my free arm – barely enough to grasp the fruit with my fingertips. Only if you evenly distribute your weight to all three spots are the thinning branches able to hold your weight.
For an instant, I wish I had a way to film this so I can drop the video in our family chat – the temporarily neglected conscious mind and the ego make themselves felt. But my eyes already caught the next deep-purple fruit, and the thought disappears as fast as it came.
When I’m climbing, I often fully lose myself in the moment. Sometimes the world shrinks to the size of the leafy dome that I’m sitting in, and I’m not aware of anything on the outside, except the sounds of the wind, birdsong, and the chirping of the crickets. In those moments, when it’s only me, the tree and the wind, I utilize more of the right brain hemisphere’s mode of perception, and boundaries start to dissolve.
Often, I completely forget feeling hungry or thirsty, and it’s only when I’m back on the ground that I’m suddenly alerted to my rumbling stomach, or my dry throat.
No two mangosteen trees are the same, although they look the same at first glance. Most sprout singular trunks, but some have two separate tops, merging together into a single, broad crown. But one thing that all the largest and most productive trees have in common is that there are a few areas within the dome where the branches look like winding stairs, arranged in a spiral pattern.
This is the mangosteen trees’ ideal of beauty – branches sprouting in an upwards spiral from both sides, like the double helix of DNA, a sacred shape, as the crown stretches towards the sun. This is what all mangosteen trees strive for, and what they would do in perfect conditions, with just enough sunlight from all sides (Mangosteen appreciate a little shade, but not too much), water at almost all times except for the few weeks before the flowers open, fertile, well-drained soil full of nutrients, with a rich diversity of other plants, microorganisms and fungi with whom to communicate and trade. It indicates health, strength and vigor. Trees that grow up in more difficult conditions will have to compromise, sometimes sprouting branches that are right above one another, when all available sunlight comes from the side, not from above. Trees whose tops were torn off or cut always resprout two new tops, in a bid to have one left in case another such accident happens.
A lot of thought goes into making a new branch. And it has to. Growing up is not a game when you’re a plant – a lot is at stake. Which one of the countless dormant meristem cells should be activated, on which side and at which height, to ensure that the branch will get the most sunlight without blocking out too much sunlight from other branches? In which direction should more energy be expended to produce leaves (which depends on the season and the surrounding vegetation), which other plants are in the vicinity and how are they likely to grow and influence sunlight?18 Are there any obstacles, or maybe opportunities? Is the wind usually stronger on this side, and thus more energy should be allocated for making the branches even sturdier?
I don’t know why I realize that in this exact moment. It feels like the tree told me this, like you’d point out some minor quirk about yourself in a casual conversation. And who knows how exactly thoughts are perceived?
All this could be explained away by our brains’ impressive capabilities to recognize patterns, but this explanation seems too self-congratulatory for me. Maybe this is wishful thinking, but I’m convinced that other beings and entities can directly influence our thinking.19
And there is a pronounced difference in climbing living, breathing trees – and dead ones.
Earlier this year, I had to climb a 20m-high tree that had died of a fungal infection, an early successional softwood species right next to our pond – probably one of the most dangerous things I’ve done since we moved here. The tree was already dead for a considerable time, and since I couldn’t climb it safely during last year’s rainy season, I had to wait until the rains abated, by which time the tree was completely dead and the wood dry.
I had to take it down piece by piece, since both our water pump and our drinking water tank were within the potential debris radius.
Climbing a dead tree is a completely different feeling, since the tree – especially as it loses more and more of its limbs – doesn’t lazily sway in the wind, but instead vibrates rapidly as a response to your every movement. There is no way to tell how much weight each branch will support, and the biggest risk was that the trunk might give in at its base – especially since the tree in question already leaned dangerously towards the downslope of the hill ki grew on.
The pleasant feeling I call เมาต้นไม้ (mao dtôn-mái; “intoxicated from [climbing] trees”), when one is already back on the ground but everything seems to sway a bit for some time – similar to stepping off a boat – is replaced by an irritating sensation that feels a bit like being drugged.
But even during this exceptional climb, I had not a single distracting thought on my mind and was laser-focused on the present moment.
For me, climbing trees is spiritual medicine, heart balm, stress relief, forest therapy, exercise regimen, and so many other things combined. It helps me to calm my thoughts, ground myself, and practicing it continuously teaches me how to use and trust my body.
Mindfulness can be easily achieved with a large variety of tasks, and I believe that there is an evolutionarily relevant, subsistence-related activity out there for everyone – running, hiking, hunting/stalking prey, etc. – that is vastly more holistically beneficial for you than sitting on your butt.20
Over the years, I’ve not only become stronger but calmer and more rooted, and I have started viewing trees in an entirely different light – with deep reverence and respect for those ancient, majestic beings that are, in many regards, so much wiser than we could ever hope to be, and that we can learn so much from.
No amount of mindfulness meditation could have ever achieved what the trees have taught me.
“Here I stand in awe, deeply moved by the sheer beauty you cast forth… I feel small and minuscule in the face of your size, your age, your experience, your wisdom. How many cycles of the sun, the moon and the seasons you have seen, how many times you have felt life and death, suffering and happiness, grief and joy. How sophisticated your branches wind to grow towards the sun, how elaborate your leaves are spread, how elegant they dance in the wind; of what inconceivable complexity is the vast and deep network of roots from which you draw just what you need, never more. You give more than you take, you know your place, you are humble, altruistic, generous and friendly. You know this place better than I ever will, and you understand its will better than I can ever fathom. You are my inspiration, my paragon, and I wish to learn from you as much as you can teach me, so that one day I will be as wise as you – so that one day I will become you.”
— Prayer to a tree (from one of my earliest essays)
And because I can’t get myself to do the whole “talk to the camera” thing (for fear that people think I’m an “influencer” or a “youtuber”) here’s another awkward, wordless video from earlier this year showing me doing recreational climbing in the forest:
I write stuff like the above in my free time, when I’m not tending the piece of land we’re rewilding here at Feun Foo. As a subsistence farmer by profession I don’t have a regular income, so if you have a few bucks to spare please consider supporting my work with a small donation:
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Slight edit: I might have broken a rib after falling off a tree as a teenager, but I never went to the doctor. It’s a mistake you make only once: hanging sloth-style from a dead branch that, midway through this exercise, decides that it won’t support you any longer.
I do have to admit that many of the attributes commonly ascribed to various Chinese zodiac signs have at least some merit, and fit many people I know well with eerie precision. But maybe that’s the same phenomenon as with trashy horoscopes that are so vaguely formulated that a wide range of possible interpretations automatically covers most people’s experiences. What do I know?
Until this day, my grandmother never tires of recounting how I was already high up in the canopy of the cherry tree before she even got to the door to greet us.
ฝรั่งขึ้นต้นไม้ (fà-ràng kêun dtôn-mái)
Curiously enough they still drive on Thailand’s roads without as much as a second thought, statistically a much higher risk. Thailand ranks in the top five of the most dangerous roads in the world, with over 20,000 traffic deaths annually. (For comparison, Germany – with a similar population size – has about 3,000.)
One of them is – and I kid you not – the hangman’s noose.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a video of the process. I’ll upload one after next year’s harvest!
I strongly believe that being filmed while doing risky climbs brings “bad luck,” so I try my best to avoid it – the last thing I want is that my last moments become a short-lived internet sensation à la WATCH THE FINAL MOMENTS OF THIS GERMAN DROPOUT RIGHT BEFORE HE PLUNGES TO HIS DEATH.
Expressed by Derrick Jensen as follows: “If I consume the flesh of another I am responsible for the continuation of its [sic] community.” I would add that this also occasionally includes taking lives without consuming the flesh, as we don’t eat the trees that we cut down during chop-and-drop – but we nonetheless make sure that at least one individual within the borders of our modest piece of land is allowed to thrive and procreate.
I know this sounds a bit condescending, but – first of all – I sometimes wear harem pants as well; and secondly, I can’t really blame them for their excitement. We were raised in a spiritually empty culture that mocks and derides “spirituality” as superstitious delusions for ancients, old people and feeble minds that can’t handle their own mortality and the utter meaninglessness of the Universe. For many of those deplorable “lost souls,” meditation (and yoga) provide the very first entry into “Spirituality” in a more general sense. Furthermore, they are on the right track – meaningful spirituality is one of the most important things people throughout the so-called “developed” world are lacking today. A profound spiritual connection to each other and the Living World is a cross-cultural universal, and contemporary society is the first of its kind, in that it categorically denies the very existence of any such things, on the mere grounds that you can’t measure such “supernatural phenomena” with machines.
My own brother lived in a forest monastery without electricity for a few months, head and eyebrows shaved, in white clothes, sometimes sleeping on the forest floor. The “Forest Tradition” of Thai Buddhism is like a more traditional (but also a much smaller) branch of Theravāda Buddhism, one that sticks more closely to the actual teachings of the Buddha. “Forest Temples” (วัดป่า) stand in stark contrast to “Village Temples” (วัดบ้าน), in which money and wealth (most obvious in the forms of donations in exchange for “good karma,” monks handing out lottery numbers, and whole barrels of golden paint applied to all surfaces) play an outsized role, and ecology and wider interconnectedness is given much less importance. (It is common to see village temple grounds completely yellowed by herbicide, which is sometimes donated to temples by worshippers as a way to make merit. I usually don’t use emojis in my writing, but🤦!)
According to Thai Buddhism (Theravāda), if you’re a woman, your only chance to attain Nirvana is to be reborn as a man first – really! Ordained nuns are not allowed to wear the orange robes, but instead wear white clothes. Women are not even allowed to touch monks, lest they contaminate them with their inherent “sinfulness” and “impurity.” Sorry again, but🤦!!!
I am aware that this is often the opposite of what the spiritual founders of those religions practiced, preached & intended, but if their words allow for such wanton misinterpretations, maybe it’s time to look for a new teacher. People who lived thousands of years ago generally have very little to teach us about the various aspects of modern life – for instance, pesticides, noise & light pollution, social media or mechanized resource extraction simply didn’t exist back then, so there was no need for guidlines. Moreover, all those “spiritual leaders” were members (i.e. captives) of civilizations – “Takers,” to use Quinn’s words, victims of what he calls “The Great Forgetting.” None of them truly understood human Nature, because none of them knew (let alone understood) the full extend of our species’ history (and what this means for who we are). And even the most conscious spiritual traditions are simply no match for the power of the advertising (i.e. “brainwashing”) industry of turbocharged late-stage consumer capitalism.
Yes, that’s how the majority of practicing Theravāda Buddhists here view the issue. And I thought only Christians were that gullible.
I don’t dispute that suffering is an inescapable feature of life, I just have a problem with making it the main aspect. If you’d ask hunter-gatherers (“Leavers”) about the issue, I’m sure that, while they would most certainly agree that life inevitably entails some suffering, it is not the one attribute you use to describe it. Furthermore, I’m aware that the Buddha never said “suffering” – he used the term dukkha, which is much more ambiguous – but that’s nonetheless how it is being interpreted by the general public. For instance, many Thai Buddhists downplay the fact that almost everyone these days seems to have some sort of chronic disease and the majority of people are on medications constantly by referring to the “First Noble Truth” of Buddhism. Well, why fight pollution and exploitation, why change diet, lifestyle & environment if “life is suffering” anyway? Isn’t this just the way things are supposed to be? Who are we to think we can do anything about it?
Before sending this book to our favorite not-too-concerned-about-copyrights print shop I had to change the cover, since you risk serious legal consequences for “defiling Buddhist imagery” – the cover is the head of a Buddha statue overlaid with clown makeup. I didn’t feel like taking any risks.
A term coined by Darcia Narvaez in her fascinating (but pretty depressing) book The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities. For clarification: it’s not the book itself that is depressing (I highly recommend it), it’s the stark contrast to today’s reality that hits hard. Modern humans often do the exact opposite of what we’re supposed to do, especially in regard to child-rearing, education and community building/maintenance. Needless to say, the behavioral consequences observed in contemporary society aren’t that surprising when put into this context.
Over the years of diligent observation, I have become convinced that trees can – to some extent – even predict the future. Many of them are hesitant to produce any new growth that stretches into the direction of a close-by tree if it belongs to a longer-lived species – they tend to avoid or try to circumvent any such obstacles – but if the shadow above them comes from the leaves of a relatively short-lived banana plant, they seem to know and understand this very well, and don’t cease growth in anticipation of its timely disappearance.
One cross-cultural human universal is that each culture holds beliefs that are obviously nonsensical for any uninitiated outsider. In our case, likely candidates for this category include a) the belief that other animals & plants can actually understand what we’re saying to them somehow, b) that their inner lives are much more like our own than even the latest scientific findings suggest, and c) that living beings and entities considered “non-living” by the dominant culture are connected to a much greater extent than is commonly assumed. Maybe they aren’t that nonsensical after all, but they most certainly seem so to members of the dominant culture, who would scoff at such notions.
Obesity among monks in Thailand has skyrocketed in recent years, with almost half of all monks now classified as overweight or obese. And while any publications on the issue usually shift blame away from the monks and onto the general population (the monks can’t be picky eaters, they mostly eat what people place in their alms bowls), it is not uncommon to see monks buying snacks, energy drinks and cigarettes at 7-Eleven stores throughout the Kingdom. Even in the forest monastery my brother stayed at, a new rule that limited the size of the cups used for the monks’ afternoon drink intended to combat rising levels of obesity. Monks typically don’t eat anything after lunch, but they are nonetheless allowed a drink of their choice in the afternoon – common choices include sweetened Thai milk tea, sachets of intensely sweet “3-in-1” instant coffee, and sodas. Over time, the monks had started using larger and larger cups for that extra dose of afternoon dopamine. Apparently, even daily Buddhist practice can’t curb sugar cravings.
Yea, mangosteen trees are great to climb. I use three limbs plus my butt to spread my weight too as one hand reaches out to get the fruit.
I guess tree climbing provides the kind of physical, mental, and emotional stimulation we have been evolved for. The physical movements are so varied and I enjoy the stretches (eg legs spread wide between two trunks). Mentally it is like navigating a puzzle, finding routes through the trees, testing the strength of branches with all four limbs, etc. Emotionally, there is always some fear because one could get hurt badly. The stimulation we didnt evolve for are city noises, car rides, urban fumes, etc. Meditation asks for no stimulation but maybe we just need the stimulation that makes us more human!
A few years ago I went for an arborist tree climbing course with all those ropes. It is very much against my instinct to trust all my weight to a rope, even though i know it is very strong. I kept trying to grab the tree with my limbs! But if you get past that, you can scale trees and reach the ends that without the ropes would be impossible. I saw a tree climbing competition here too and they have to ring the bells at different parts of the tree and get down as fast as possible. But like you said, I think it makes people take more risk and the pure joy of climbing is reduced by extrinsic motivation.
The orang aslis here drive 6 inch nails into the petai trees to climb them. Sometimes they hammer bamboo pieces in to make a ladder. Or tie a bamboo to the petai as a ladder. So many methods! It is a big part of their income because no one else does it.
The tualang trees that they harvest honey from are crazy big and tall. Feels like climbing a wall really.
As a fellow tree climber, I loved this essay.