A Tree Will Grow into a Forest

There is an Aspen tree in the Fishlake National Forest in Utah that weighs over 6,000 tons, spans 107 acres and consists of some 47,000 trunks. It is one of the world's largest living organisms rivaled by another Aspen grove near Crested Butte, Colorado and a fungus in Oregon that stretches over 1,000 acres. It is also one of the oldest, with estimates ranging from 80,000 to over one million years old. Every one of those thousands of what appear to be trees shares the exact same genetic material--perfect clones. They bloom at the same time and shed leaves at the same time. This phenomenon of Aspen trees sharing the same root system, being of the same organism, having sprouted thousands of years ago from one seedling, explains the unique sensation of standing in an Aspen grove or observing one yellowing on the lower slopes of a mountain in late October, quaking and chattering in the breeze. There is a harmony there, in the movement, in the sounds--as if a gentle conversation is underway in some archaic language, a conversation full of subjects profound and net yet even considered by our burgeoning human intellect. This makes me think of the idea of fractals or the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm. The thought that you can take a small piece of something and it is a representation of something much larger. This is how I understand the healing effects of homeopathic remedies. We are able to ingest an untraceably small dilution of a substance from the natural world; our body, soul, spirit, life force will recognize it as a part of us that is having difficulty, and show our self how to make the appropriate changes that will bring about healing. As with the Aspens, we are perhaps all a piece of the cosmos, hold the entire cosmos within us, the same materials, the same physical forces, gravity, levity, attraction, repulsion, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen. The future calls to us through the struggles of the Aspen groves to send up new shoots, through the dwindling rain forests of the Amazon, through depleted reserves in the Ogallala Aquifer, through our hungry neighbors and the 34,000 people who are forcibly displaced every day, the 65 million people who have been forced from home, the 21 million refugees. The 42,000 trunks of the Trembling Giant, the Pando Aspen grove blossom together, drop their leaves together, share water and minerals; they speak in their archaic language of truths we can hear in the eyes of a stranger, in the laughter of a child, in the trials and sufferings of every human being. The future is able to show us, through this wonderful web of information, homeopathic pictures of our collective pathologies and the remedies available to heal them. Whether in an Aspen grove or the Genographic Project by National Geographic, through Instagram or the UN Refugee Agency, it is becoming ever more challenging to ignore the grand unity of our cosmic situation. Stories, pictures, information--homeopathic doses of remedies for an ailing world are at our fingertips, in the white bark and trembling leaves of a giant, ancient tree.