The beech trees in the Netherlands are dying.
I took this picture last week, during one of the heat waves. On the side facing the road, the bark has burst open and dried out completely. So the tree can no longer carry water up to its crown and branches. That’s the reality now for so many of these majestic giants, all across the country.
I live on the Utrechtse Heuvelrug, where the beech forests are everywhere. And everywhere I go, I see it: the cracks in the bark, the trees struggling to move that life-giving water up to their limbs and hands and leaves.
So there I am, sitting in a traffic jam alongside trees that can’t uproot themselves. They can’t pull their roots out of the ground and say, “it’s too hot here, I’m going somewhere cooler to settle down.” They stay put. And they die, slowly. They have nowhere to go.
The asphalt I am on soaks up the sun all day and throws it straight back as heat. The trees beside it, the grass behind it, they are still doing their work. Still pulling the heat in, still cooling the air, still trying. The strip we laid down between them is what’s cooking them.
That’s a brutal grief to carry. And underneath it, an overwhelming guilt of being part of the very species responsible for this. I am part of it. I’m sitting right there in my car. Sure, it’s electric, but so what? Every material it’s made of was pulled out of the earth, contributing to exactly this.
The guilt and the shame feel so isolating. So does the grief. But I know there are so many more people out there who feel exactly the same.
This I feel strongly: we need to come together. We need to talk about this. We need to find a way of being with it, and of supporting each other in finding small (or big) ways to ease the burden on those trees, and the animals, and all the living beings caught up in this.
Because I know one thing for sure: together we are powerful. Look at the world and how we have shaped it up until now. Together we can also do this.
We have a circle where we come together every week: to share, and to sit with the wisdom of non-duality alongside this deep ecological crisis.
Reflection
So I’ll leave you with the question I keep asking myself:
What are the circles in which you help each other carry this? Where, this week, do you let the grief and the guilt be held by more than just you?
How do you see this?