Last night I had a fun conversation with some arborist friends of mine via Skype on discussion topics for the upcoming Fids and Fibers splicing workshop that Mark Przekurat is hosting in February. After a few good laughs and some exploration of the brainstorming process, this is the one bold note I excavated into the small white notepad I was using:

How do I know what I know is right?

Well, if we think of ourselves and everything we know as a collage, or a mosaic, that is a pretty good allegory to run with here. Our character traits, how we do certain things, the processes we follow, our anxieties, our fears and our strengths-all of those things are acquired through a collaborative, systemic system. And so too is the information in our minds that is deeply connected to all of those traits; things like working load limit, tree biomechanic principals, sales tactics right down to the insurance policies we choose. Like little chipmunks dwelling in a forest, we’ve scurried around as fast as we can our whole lives collecting things that may help us in the future. And then don’t forget, we reinvent those little things too, so they become something totally different in a year or five. Forever evolving antiques, our influences.

And so I promised my friends this blog post, and then I hit the bookshelf in search of something that may help me explain how it is that I know what I know is right…

To my rescue, a little almost coffee-table book of inspiration from the author Austin Kleon, Steal Like An Artist.

Perfect.

I bought the book at Urban Outfitters a while back. It’s the kind you can read before you check out, containing great little tidbits of inspiration from great artists that reads like a manual on how great art and great ideas are pirated from other great ideas. That we are thieves in that sense, always stealing things and making them our own.

“The German writer Goethe said, ‘We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.'” (11).

So, by Goethe’s account, the mosaic that we become as artists, as tradespeople and as craftspersons, is rooted in love. The ideas we love are forever fused to the people who give them to us.

Every arborist is therefore a collaboration of their own heroes, teachers and mentors. Friends, crew leaders, company owners and subcontractors, crane operators and diesel mechanics. Every thing we know has come from one of these people, either from a day at work, from a book they’ve written, or in a class where they were teaching. If arboriculture is both and art and a science, I am grateful to all of the arborists that have influenced me because they are all artists and they are all scientists. One is not more one or the other, but both all the time.

Therefore, arboriculture is a perfect example of art as a science-as science as an art. Working with trees is really a process of discovery. Looking at trees up close, we see things that we couldn’t from a hundred feet away. Looking at trees thirty years from now, or two hundred, we will see things we can’t see today: how they live and thrive, or how they decline and eventually die. But in any case, the learning will be a collaborative process, and it will be, at least in the eyes of an arborist, both art and science.

So then, we know what we know not just because we consider it right, but because we consider it sacred. Like the Chickadee that I have written of before, wisdom comes from listening intently to those around us. Austin Kleon in his book tells us that it comes from stealing. Either way, knowledge is sacred for the the arborist, the bank robber and the candlestick maker.

 

The secret is this with both art and science and being right: you just have to know where to look.

This post is dedicated to all of the wonderful teachers and mentors in the field of arboriculture that have done more for the industry than they will ever know in maybe the smallest ways that they could never know. We are no doubt fashioned and shaped by what we love.