A Mother Tree in Gaza
“Be like a tree. The tree gives shade even to him who cuts off its boughs.”
Trees are communal and communicative. Trees recognize each other, and they recognize individual humans. Trees respond to emergencies. When a forest is stressed or under attack, Mother Trees coordinate emergency dispersal of nutrients to saplings. They send chemical warnings to each other in times of duress. Like humans and other animals, trees suffer trauma and loss: they are unacknowledged victims of war. It’s only our false hierarchy that places human consciousness and human suffering above that of trees and other beyond-human beings.
The sentience of trees is part of the message embedded in the events set in motion by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza last November, when a bomb blew up a house and killed the family inside, including children and extended family. A newborn baby girl was the only survivor. The explosion sent her briefly airborne as she flew into the embrace of a tree that stood, branch-arms open, next to the rubble that was once her family’s home. When the baby was discovered in her tree-cradle, doctors estimated she was two days old. No one knew her family. The infant had no name. She spent the next several months in an incubator.
Since those first precarious weeks, the doctor who coordinated her care has adopted her and the doctor’s whole family is now devoted to raising her. It’s an unusual arrangement: normally, there would be extended family to take her in, and single Palestinian women seldom choose to become single parents.
Because we know that trees have agency underground, we must recognize that they have agency above ground as well. This means that the Mother Tree of Gaza likely perceived the threat to the infant and responded to the emergency in the moment, across species, as a mother. Something in the tree’s awareness helped bring the baby to safety in her generous, arboreal arms. The infant may have sensed the tree’s concern and intention to offer protection. Having lost her human mother, the baby may have recognized something motherly in the tree’s field of energy. She may have felt drawn toward the tree in the mysterious etheric awareness of newborns. Whatever the interplay between them, the baby and the Mother Tree seem to have magnetized each other in that life-or-death moment that tilted in favor of Life. It was a gesture of mutuality as ancient and fundamental as Life itself.
In the world of Philip Pullman’s novels (The Golden Compass and other stories) humans have animal daemons. These beings are an inseparable emotional and physical soul-self in animal form. The daemons have names and personalities. They observe, hear and remember things. They offer affection and comfort. Humans and their daemons discuss things. They share secrets and dreams. Most important, distance is painful and separation means death. Though we no longer practice those intimate connections, and we try to convince ourselves that we and our natural kin are separable, the same is true in our world.
Healthy humans require a healthy environment. More than that, we require a healthy relationship with that healthy environment. The inverse is also true: environmental destruction not only sicken us, it drives us insane. Recent research bears this out: deforestation is increasingly recognized as a predictor of impending violence. Environmental breakdown is a precursor to war. Ecocide precedes genocide, always.
In the article about the newborn in the tree, there are pictures of the baby and the doctor but none of the tree, and none of the baby in the tree’s embrace before she was delivered to human hands. We can only hope that someone thought to thank the tree, and offer it water or some other form of acknowledgment.
The role of the tree in saving the baby was likely chalked up to coincidence. But if we understand the tree’s gesture as an act of cross-species rescue, the conversation expands. Respect for beyond-human sentience erases the illusion of separateness. Recognition of that sentience and the depth of its courage and generosity keeps us tethered to the ecological intimacy that humans and Earth require. The tree’s gesture was infused with awareness, a gesture that changes things for the better, because that’s what consciousness does.
In 2004, when I first went to Liberia after the (un)civil war there had ended, I held the mistaken belief that after a war, human needs took precedence over everything else. I believed that only when people’s lives were stable and their basic needs met, could we turn our attention to the condition of the Natural World. In Liberia at that time, the physical destruction was so pervasive, it was hard to imagine how and when that stability could ever arrive. As the months ticked by, the finish line kept moving farther away. It took years to recognize what is obvious now: humans and Earth heal in tandem. If humans want peace, tending to Earth cannot be postponed.
In Liberia, we sat with a group of Muslim women to listen. Food was scarce. Most were painfully thin. We were stunned when the women told us that whenever they had even a tiny scrap of food to spare, they made offerings. The word they used was sacrifice. They explained that in their language, the word for sacrifice means to give more than you can. Though they were hungry and scarred by loss, they looked forward to making those sacrifices. It was their highest priority.
Like the Mother Tree of Gaza, the Liberian women understood that peace depends on a web of relationships that extends beyond humans to include Nature and the myriad spirits of unseen worlds. Healing after war requires the repair of that relational web and the mutuality that is its essence. The Mother Tree in Gaza literally reached out to humans to remind us how healing begins.
