It seems like I’ve been climbing sugar maples for a week now, or close to it. Both young and old. From the top of a sugar maple crown looking down reveals the structure of upwards sweeping leaders that form a large, oval crown. Long, elderly scaffold limbs covered in moss and lichen reach out into the sunlight that beckons the unfurling of this years new leaves. On the tops of older limbs are pockets of decay, little planting pots of newly germinated seeds. In one major union maybe one hundred years old, a tiny black cherry grows. Epiphyte, an epic fight. Last week the bud scales were still clasped around the new buds, photosynthetic centers under construction. This week they are gone, the little leaves still a miniature version of what they will be in still another two weeks. I had found things like old, rusty cables dangling from older, rusty through-bolts not completely swallowed yet, large cavities packed with potting soil, plastic bags hung up on the tip of a branch, blown there by the wind. Middle-aged trees battling planting problems from thirty years ago, big root plates writhing and girdling, Medusa turned upside down. One homeowner mentioned an owl that hoots nightly from its sugary cove, and I imagined it praying on even smaller rodents living three or four doors down. The trees I worked where in some cases separated by one hundred and forty miles, two and a half hours away from each other. Connected by millennia of genetic code, the same robin or tufted titmouse that sings outside my window this morning could have easily visited the same trees I have this week. One never knows.

A large country estate, a suburban neighborhood, a city street-these are the places the sugar maple grows. And like the owl, the robin, the titmouse, the neighbor and the landscaper who planted them, each tree speaks a language all its own. One in which we are constantly trying to translate.

In David George Haskell’s book The Songs of Trees he writes, “This is ecological aesthetics: the ability to perceive beauty through sustained, embodied relationship within a particular part of the community of life. The community includes humans in our various modes of being within the biological network, as watchers, hunters, loggers, farmers, eaters, story singers, and habitat for microbial killers and mutualists alike. Ecological aesthetics is not a retreat into an imagined wilderness where humans have no place but a step toward belonging in all its dimensions,” (Haskell, 149).

Haskell’s insight into ecological aesthetics inspires me as an arborist. A ‘step toward belonging in all dimensions’ is a beautiful description of how we connect with trees. This is grace, the balance or universal feeling of harmony in all dimensions. Before a cut or a cable or a rig, stop a listen. A quiet glance into the crown or canopy around you will reveal these things; the caterpillar chewing leaves, the growing leaf, a layer of cells dividing. All of it has a sound. We can hear it only when we become a part of the trees we care for.

Haskell tells us “unselfing through repeated lived experience is necessary because many biological truths reside only in relationships beyond the self,” (151). The sugar maple has reinforced this lesson for me. In this sense the arborist can become very much like the trees we care for, a fixture in the ecosystem, completely integrated with the sounds and reactions and vibrations that are constantly happening around us all the time. Maybe our job isn’t so much to control or mitigate or regulate, but to integrate, to harmonize and to strengthen those ecological connections all around us. The same way we learn day by day how to decipher the language of trees, we can use that same language to tell the stories of trees.

Haskell reveals that “trees are masters of integration, connecting and unselfing their cells into the soil, the sky, and thousands of other species. Because they are not mobile, to thrive they must know their particular locus on the Earth far better than any wandering animal. Trees are the Platos of biology. Through their Dialogues, they are the  best-placed creatures of all to make aesthetic and ethical judgments about beauty and good in the world,” (153).

So when I move through the old sugar maples, I know that it is not just me that is climbing. I am unknowingly dancing to this song that Haskell writes about, the song of the tree. In all dimensions around us their are a millions notes harmonized. At the end of a branch tip, I stop, and try to remove myself from things. A slight breeze picks up and wisps through the crown around me and I am left bouncing very gently to the rhythm of the world.

Dancing with sugar maples.