A Really Weird 2024 Wrap-Up

One day I’ll write a normal newsletter, but today is not that day.

I sat down to recap my highlights for 2024 and then I got caught in a weird yo-yo of “oh, no, I haven’t accomplished that much” and “people will think I’m bragging”. I kept yo-yo-ing for about forty-eight hours at which point my brain imploded on itself. Anyway, instead of all that, I’m going to talk to you about a tree.

Two years ago, I lived in Victoria, BC, Canada’s Most Doomed City (Seriously, it is, check it out). I spent an unholy amount of time working, doing nothing I had planned to do (climb at Squamish, go to Tofino, learn to surf, sit outside, sleep a normal amount), but the one trip me and my partner managed to make was to Cathedral Grove (located on the traditional lands of Tseshaht and Snaw-naw-as First Nations people, and the K'ómoks nation) which is home to a bunch of easily accessible Douglas firs.

Descriptions of trees are hard, so here’s a photograph of what those trees look like.

The point is that they’re HUGE, and the reason that they’re this HUGE is that they’re also hella OLD. These trees have seen some stuff, some historic stuff.

There is quite a range of how old these trees are. By some estimates, the oldest ones are more than 800 years old, with most being between 300 and 400 years old. So, let’s assume, I was looking at a 300-year-old tree. What historical events would that tree have witnessed? Well, for one, the tree is nearly twice as old as Canada (Canada, as a country turned 157 in 2024). The tree existed well before the television. The tree was hanging out before the smallpox vaccine was invented and is older than the bicycle. That’s all pretty impressive!

As we walked deeper into the grove we finally got to the largest tree at the grove—the Giant Douglas Fir, the oldest tree in the grove, an 800-year-old tree, a tree that was there before Europeans ever knew the Americas existed, a tree that was there while Genghis Khan was still around doing Genghis Khan stuff.

[shameness Ukraine plug, but Kyiv was already a city, just sayin’]

Back to our tree.

I can’t describe the feeling of standing before something that ancient. If all things go right, this tree will live for another 200-400 years. This tree not only knew the earth before I was ever a twinkle in my father’s eyes, but will stand long after as well. How can my concerns, my problems, ever compare to the experience of living for 800 hundred years?

There was a moment when I was standing beside it, hesitating to touch the bark. My partner asked me why I was waiting, and I said, “I’m afraid it’ll change me.” It took a few minutes, but I did eventually touch the bark, and it did change me. There were 800 years of history beneath that bark, 800 years of memories. I had never felt as seen and as protected as when I touched and witnessed the tree, and the tree witnessed me back.

The academic elite might take my Ph.D. away for saying this, but there is magic at Cathedral Grove. There is magic in facing your mortality in such a gentle way. A good tree will bring that on.

The wave of scientific materialism has brought on the belief that things need to be measured and quantified, and rationalized to be “real” and “valuable”. We’ve inadvertently created a dichotomy of science and everything else (pseudoscience if you will), of reason and superstition, of secular and holy. I have a freakin’ Ph.D. I have complete faith in medicine, and physics, and chemistry. But I will also insist that the best medicine is carried out with heart, and the most groundbreaking physics are done out of love, and chemistry, well, I will not speak to chemistry. it makes me panic.

All I know is that there is no way to quantify my experience of being there with that fir. You can give me a survey, you can shove my head into an fMRI, you can measure my cortisol levels as I touch the bark, but you will never capture the way my self-importance dissolved into the greying sky, without ever putting up a fight. You cannot capture the humbling moment of standing before history itself, of touching it, and having it press back against your palm, of feeling the ancient life run beneath it.

It’s easy to scoff and dismiss these feelings as “human small”, “tree big”, “human like big thing”, but it goes beyond that. It’s a realization that, for all of our human progress, we are still very vulnerable and temporary in the face of time. We’ve grown too comfortable with relying on farce to shy away from complicated emotions that science has few explanations for. But I guarantee it, that if you were to sit with that fir for longer than a moment, if you touched it, and accepted just how temporary you were compared to that tree, the magic would come over you too.

Find a good tree. It doesn’t have to be a Douglas fir. Find a tree and sit with it. Try to reflect on how you are so brief, how all of us are. Make peace with it. The tree will help you.

I wanted to write a newsletter about the stuff I’ve done in 2024, but it all seems kind of insignificant, compared against 800 years of living. I wanted to talk about all the things that went right and the things that went wrong, but every single time, all I can think of is that the tree still stands, and that must mean something. For 800 hundred years, that tree had endured and survived, and bore witness to the change around it.

Maybe we can learn something from it about weathering storms without always fighting them head on. Maybe we can learn something about existing as we are, at our own pace and without comparison.

Maybe we can try to be a good tree.

In Writing News

Dragonfly has been making some lists, which is incredible, but also super unexpected, but also VERY welcome! For all my tree talk, it does spark something in me to see this little novella resonate with so many folks.

Thank you everyone for supporting this novella! It’s been a ride!

Did you know? I’m guest-editing a Myriad zene called NOCTURNAL! The cover and ToC have been recently revealed and I can’t wait for everyone to read the stories come January 10th!

Includes:

“Touqi” by Lixin Foo

“Wolf Roses” by Sylvia Heike

“What the Boys Lost” by Marisca Pichette

“The Care and Feeding of Your Void” by Lynne Sargent

“A Candle In the Night” by José Raposo Santos

Parting Words

Want to dive deeper into the pitfalls of scientific materialism, the denaturalization of Christianity, Buddhism, and what this means for how we experience the everyday? I highly recommend this Plum Village lecture, delivered by Sister True Dedication. I like Plum Village lectures, first because, like for many non-cultural Buddhist practitioners, Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings and teachings were my introduction to Buddhism. I also like them because Plum Village retreats are expensive, I’m broke, and the lectures are free. Seriously, check them out. They’re really good.

And that’s it from me for 2024!

I hope to see everyone in 2025, and thank you for another fantastic year <3

Cheers!