Our little girl is going to be three in a month. She climbs incessantly, speaks excessively, eats successfully, and smiles profusely. She is oh-so-healthy and her health in turn strengthens ours. Everyday I marvel at what she shows me about the relationships between her nature and what some call green nature.

It’s been almost two years since she began to speak in a language that we could understand. Overjoyed and perhaps overzealous, we new parents took this as a sign that it was indeed time to teach our little one the popular labels of our culture. After “mommy” and “daddy” and the appellations of those humans closest to us, we branched out to the next closest corporal reality – body parts. And this is when my education began.

Yes I do know most of my own body parts and even those of others (I studied anatomy while learning massage therapy). It wasn’t even her rapid grasp of individual body parts that grabbed my adoring attention, rather it was her play on perception, her reality of relationship. Allow me to explain.

She easily learned eyes and ears, knees and nose, elbows and hands, head and toes. What intrigued me was her difficulty, perhaps resistance, to seeing her knees or her nose as separate from any others. When asked she could “correctly” point to mommy’s nose or daddy’s toes or her own elbow but often as not she would mix up whose nose was whose or which knee belonged to whose leg. So over and over we reinforced the distinction, the separation, clearly defining who owned what. And eventually she learned or ... acquiesced.

She now knows her nose and recognizes or accepts that it is separate from mine. As parents, my partner and I are proud ... and saddened at what seems to be a necessary developmental learning stage.

As I daily observe the human nature of my daughter I am reminded of a recent learning in the world of green nature. This is the world to which I often turn to make meaning from my own experiences. It concerns my favourite form of Yukon gold, the trembling aspen, Populus tremuloides to use its botanically correct, widely accepted label. Exactly what does the aspen have to teach us about relationships? Plenty so it would seem.

According to naturalist Wayne Lynch this popular species of poplar is particularly proliferous when it comes to propagation. Yes, like many trees they will send off seeds whose cottony wisps are carried on the wind, but more often than not they simply send out horizontal roots from which new trees grow vertically. This might explain why I’ve heard more than one person complain about trying to eradicate aspens from their backyards.

Their common root system is actually a single organism, sharing a common set of genes. One particular grove in Utah was counted by researchers to contain 47,000 individual tree trunks. They believe it may be the heaviest and largest organism on the planet. There is credible speculation that the Yukon may also have a grove or two equally as large.

To me this is remarkable. For years my formal schooling in “Forest Engineering” taught that a forest is made up of individual and separate trees. This is not always true; in fact it may come to be soon widely accepted that trees in a forest are more like fingers on the same hand. Whether it is through the discovery of the connecting role of mycorrhizal fungi or of actual root connections, science continues to provide proof of what spirit has been saying for eons.

What often appears on the surface as separate, when we dig a little deeper, can be shown to be irrefutably similar if not the same. Perhaps there really is no separation at all. Perhaps my little girl already knew this. For her, my nose or her mum’s nose was her own nose until we taught her differently. Maybe baby knees and aspen trees are made of the same stuff.

I hope that this developmental learning stage of labeling and seeing as separate will soon lose its luster for humanity and that we will not take much longer before we again perceive people and places, wild and domestic, as body parts of a whole being.

Morris Lamrock

Morris Lamrock is an environmental educator working for the Department of the Environment in the Yukon. He is currently at The Haven participating in Phase II: Self and Other.