Plagued By Consciousness

The tree possesses a power that I am deeply jealous of; is it unparalleled, unapologetic, unconditional, absolute resilience? Resilience, is that the correct word? Survival, is that it? No, it is something else. Survival or resilience implies an active, intentional push or movement towards and against, striving through and past. Survival and resilience implicate a violence outside of one’s own that one fights the odds of. The tree – the plant – has something else. It has something peaceful, unwavering, unmoving, yet consistently moving, always rooted, never stagnant. It is non-violent, non-active, restful, but also non-passive, non-surrendering, immobile, and mobile. It does not fall at the feet of the industrial revolution or farming, unlike how I fall at the feet of the patriarchy.

Nor does it fall at the feet of a trim to its stems, unlike how I fall at the feet of a change in the weather. It dances in a gentle wave with the ‘ups and downs’ of what I call, “the graph of life.” The tree is not restrained by the linearity of the graph, sometimes even going faster and faster, in wild twists and turns, almost teasing the humps of the graph as if reminding them they’ve got no control over it! And once it has had its fun, it rests back into its soft, gentle dance. As the graph steepens, the tree moves with it but ever so slightly so as to never leave its equilibrium. Its equilibrium that is unpredictable. It is active and reactive, and somehow non active. It has control and no control at once. All of it is happening at the same time. And that is just the tree as an individual, balancing itself out with the joys and sorrows that life brings it. It seems to always know exactly what to do and seems to have all the correct answers: it has full access to its knowledge of itself and the world. There never comes a situation where it does not choose exactly what to do. It even chooses its own death - a death that, from my perspective, seems thrown onto it with violence, aggression, greed, and injustice. But to the tree, it is somehow even in control of that! It chooses to die! It sees death as valuable and worthy of its time as birth. It dies beautifully and cherishes the process of its death, regardless of how it is ‘killed.’ Perhaps because it cannot be killed in a way that matters. It treats every day – including the day of its death – as yet another ‘accomplishment.’ 

It is an accomplishment of the life that it has lived – be it a century, a year, or just a day – and a celebration of what its corpse is yet to accomplish; it knows of the nutrients its body will spread to the land, and the new life that will be reborn out of its own. But the catch is, an accomplishment to the tree is not how we think of accomplishments; it is not something special, happening at small bursts throughout our lives. I believe that for the tree, an accomplishment is just ‘living.’ It seems that when the tree ‘does tree,’ it feels quite accomplished, and well luckily for the tree, it ‘does tree’ every day! It ‘does tree’ from the first time its soul exists. The process of ‘doing tree’ is intertwined in every millisecond and every minute detail of its life – from birth to death and beyond.

Farah Elmowafy, 2025

I would imagine that this feeling of much accomplishment produced from just a day of living overwhelms the tree, and like an overfilled bottle, it pours everywhere that eventually, perhaps after a day or two of ‘doing tree,’ it is no longer special. It is no longer conscious. The tree is so accomplished it is so normal to it much like breathing is normal to us. Not only is it no longer special but it also no longer needs to be defined. The feeling of accomplishment, to the tree, is simply what the tree is. Thus, the tree’s “resilience,” “survival,” “peacefulness,” and “reactivity” are not active characteristics that it pursues. I am not saying that ‘doing tree’ involves the human concepts of resilience and survival, because ‘doing tree’ is something only secret to the tree that I cannot know or define.