There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of a sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
Scottish essayist and philosopher Thomas Carlyle
The society we live in isn't just an agglomeration of individuals but a living organism with a life of its own and its own agenda, and even the movers and shakers of a society are almost certainly not fully aware of how they’re affected by the collective data stream that washes over us. Fads, herd behavior, and mob movements have a power and cumulative contagion all their own that sweep masses of people up in their momentum as people become intoxicated with the collective energy generated. This happens with everything from fashion and pop music to “mean girls,” Facebook likes and dislikes, lynch mobs, and political movements like Trump’s base and “Stop the steal!” There are 15 million military assault rifles in the hands of civilian Americans. How did that happen?
A person's self-worth tends to be a reflection of what they feel is society’s collective judgment of them, even if most of us are largely unconscious of how we learned to feel and think about ourselves. So we expend a lot of energy trying to live up to the amorphous image of what we feel society thinks we should be as we watch the images in TV commercials of impossibly beautiful women, professional athletes with bodies few will ever have, women who have both brilliant public careers and families, and people who have wealth beyond our reach but not beyond our dreams, while we take “vacations” at casinos and buy Powerball ticket after ticket, sometimes handfuls at a time, hoping to hit the jackpot.
Am I “good enough”? I spent a few decades of my life feeling doubt about the answer to that question. I wasn’t exactly asking myself that seriously, but the feeling of not being as good a man as I should be would hang around like a cloud and come up in all kinds of specific situations. I was full of self-doubt. The culture we live in encourages us to constantly ask that question, to be daily measuring ourselves in one way or another, playing on a fear that maybe we might not be as good as we “should” be. We get messages about not being good enough from parents, peers who are friends and unfriends, teachers, ministers, bosses, plus the constant barrage we’re inundated with from TV commercials, magazines, and billboards inciting worry about our worth or presenting fantasies of perfection that few if any of us can come close to. Many of us tentatively know they’re unreal, but the constant media barrage and sometimes frequent criticism from people we interact with infiltrates our unconscious psyches with a steady stream of messages creating doubt about our worth, and maybe even a conviction that we aren’t who we should be, regardless of what we profess to ourselves on a conscious level. Maybe it would be saner to ask “Good enough for what?” or ”Good enough for whom?” How good do I need to be and why?
Some of us step back and ask ourselves what we’re doing it for. Why are we so susceptible to the advertising that we know on some level is a lie and an illusion? I read a book a few decades ago called The Imposter Phenomenon by Pauline Rose Clance that gave me some critical awareness that helped immensely. It helped me realize the illusion that the way to feel good about myself was to get better or be better in some way that I thought I was falling short of was a trap, because the sense of not being good enough is for many of us an identity, an often subconscious conviction that we don’t question on any objective level. So if I feel like I’m not who I should be, when I achieve what I think will finally make me feel good enough, it doesn’t last. If I have a “not good enough” identity, it won’t be long before I start to find other ways in which I’m inadequate as that negative identity is projected onto my present experience. So the game is rigged because I always raise the “should be” bar. Achievement, though it’s satisfying, only changes how I feel temporarily.
The answer to this dilemma seems to be to become conscious that I’m unknowingly rigging the game against myself so I can’t win. I’m doing it to me! But I didn’t know that before, so there’s no cause for blame or shame. I have to be aware of it and how it works to change it. Then I can step back and realize that there is no there to get to that will give me the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that stamps me as “good enough.” Instead I’m a reasonably decent human being, a more or less average person who is pretty good or very good at some things and not good at others, one who is in a process of lifelong development that means I always have the potential to become a little better, and that’s good enough – always. Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes better. If someone is better than me in some way, more power to him, because I’m probably better than him in some other way.
The kicker that cemented this awareness was learning that Robert Redford once said that when he looked at Paul Newman’s life and achievements he wanted to go out and shoot himself (no doubt exaggerating), and that Marlon Brando once said “If there are 200 people in a room and one person doesn’t like me, I have to get out.” If Redford and Brando can struggle with this kind of unrealistically negative self-judgment, then I’m clearly vulnerable to a similar distortion of my self-image that has no basis in reality. There are those too who’s distorted view of themselves is inflated and grandiose, our previous president being a prime example – but that’s another story. Even Michael Jordan didn’t turn out to be a great golfer, and he apparently didn’t do well at gambling either. Nor has his pro basketball team been very successful. But he was pretty damn good on the basketball court himself.
Good enough has no objective definition in any area of life. I’m OK and you’re OK as a now ancient book professed, and we can all continue to grow and develop. I’m just another shmuck doing the best he can. We’re all like characters in a novel with our own set of weaknesses and strengths and our own story to tell. Which brings us around to what Thomas Carlisle was saying. A hero or heroine is not some shining white knight or pure angel, but someone like the main character in a novel or movie who has flaws as well as virtues, who propels the story and develops into someone who is altered by his or her experience. We are all that hero or heroine in the story of our own life, flawed but to be admired for weathering the storms we face and developing into a more and more mature version of ourselves. If you have trouble seeing that, read an honest biography of your hero and heroine that documents their flaws and faults as well as their virtues and achievements. The biographies I’ve read have shown me the subjects achieved what they did in spite of who they were as well as because of who they were, and knowing their faults didn’t change my admiration.
Brett Nelson
The Dance They Do: Consciousness and the Unconscious Mind
Do you trust your conscious mind or your unconscious mind more? Most people would say they trust their conscious mind, since it’s what we know. We know our unconscious mind, if we have an idea of what it is, mostly through its negative manifestations: slips of the tongue, intrusions of old habits we’re trying to outgrow, and actions that are uncharacteristic and puzzling to us – “I don’t know what came over me!” Our unconscious minds are a murky mystery that’s beyond understanding because it’s what we aren’t aware of and what we generally don’t know as ourselves.
Artists, writers, athletes, and musicians often have a different experience of the unconscious. Abstract painters and writers, including songwriters, often say that something beyond their conscious intent dictates what they paint or write. What they end up writing down was not what they intended when they picked up the pen, or they recorded thoughts they didn’t know their minds contained. Especially with their best work, they feel like they’re a vehicle for some unidentified thing that uses them as a channel to express what it wants – a description that’s not an idea but a statement of what it feels like when in the midst of the creative act. For these people the unconscious is a friend and an ally.
Athletes and professional musicians have another experience of the unconscious. Most will say that if they’re consciously thinking about what they’re doing they don’t perform well. They practice and practice and practice until the action becomes so automatic they don’t have to think about it when they’re performing. Though certainly conscious of what they’re doing, they let their unconscious muscle memory take over so they’re free to play with the intensity and spontaneity that produces a good performance. They’re not consciously thinking about how to do what they’re doing and not monitoring whether they’re doing it right. They trust their spontaneity to guide them to do what has become automatic, allowing them to play with great effort and passion without the hesitation that comes from watching to see how well they’re doing. When they lose confidence and start doubting themselves, consciously monitoring their performance to see if they’re doing it right, the performance suffers.
Psychologist Robert Moore described the stages of learning a skill in the following way (think of learning to ride a bicycle or drive a car). The first stage is unconscious incompetence: I have no ability to do something, but I don’t know that there is a skill that can be learned to do it. I’m not aware of any incompetence. This doesn’t mean I should be able to do it – it’s just something I have never learned. The second stage is conscious incompetence: I’m aware that there is a skill that can be learned. but I don’t know how to do it, The third stage is conscious competence: I’ve practiced and practiced until I’ve become skilled to some degree, but I have to pay close attention to what I’m doing if I want to do it with any degree of effectiveness. The last stage is unconscious competence: I’ve practiced and trained myself to the point that I can perform without consciously thinking about what I’m doing, free to put my full energy into it in spontaneous action.
When I’m driving a car on a six-lane street, rarely do I consciously look to see if I’m within my lane because my unconscious mind is monitoring that and making constant slight corrections to keep me in place while my conscious mind is thinking about other things most of the time. But when I was first learning to drive, I had to watch closely and concentrate to stay in my lane and not oversteer. There are probably things that all of us do besides driving a car without having to think consciously about what we’re doing. I learned to shoot a basketball much better when I began to trust my muscle memory and release the shot quickly instead of trying to feel whether I was aiming right as I was shooting. When I was watching myself and trying to feel if I was doing it right I didn’t shoot as well.
One type of evidence for the existence of the unconscious part of the psyche is in optical illusions. A famous black-and-white picture in psychology books can look to some people like a white vase on a black background or a picture of the black silhouettes of two faces looking at each other. If people who see a vase look at the image long enough, they usually see the two faces and are surprised at what they couldn’t see before, and vice-versa with those who see the image as faces first. So there’s good evidence that we have a part of our psyches and our mental functioning that exists and operates below the level of consciousness. Much scientific research has been done that tests for and demonstrates the existence of unconscious contents and processes in the human psyche.
One interesting example comes from Carl Jung’s theory of personality types, widely used in couples counseling, organizational settings like businesses and in other work groups like nonprofit organizations, and even governmental agencies. It groups people on four pairs of opposites: extroversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving, all of which he calls functions. The sensing/intuition axis describes two ways taking in information. Sensing types tend to trust what their senses tell them and stick to that, mostly what they see and hear. Intuitive types tend to “read between the lines” and “look below the surface” of things. They tend to think there is “more than meets the eye” and look for underlying relationships in what their senses tell them. The thinking/feeling axis describes two ways of making choices and decisions. Thinking types evaluate choices based on a reasoning process, while feeling types make decisions based on feeling-based values. None of the axes are either/or pairs, and people can have preferences of varying degrees. And none of the preferences are better than their opposites. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Understanding their own personality type and others’ types can help people communicate and work together better. One of the most interesting things about type is that Jung believed we all have all eight functions in our psyches, but our non-preferred modes tend to be mostly unconscious and less developed. When type is used in group situations, it helps people of opposite types speak each other’s languages and feel more understood by people who don’t operate the way they do. And there are characteristic mistakes that each type is prone to, so people can learn from others with a different type what they may not be perceiving or considering in their decision-making.
A person’s unconscious, nonpreferred function tends to become active when a person’s conscious standpoint is fully understood by the person of opposite type, or when a person’s conscious preference fails to deliver the desired result. So a sensing type person will begin to look for what’s not readily apparent only when what their senses tell them don’t explain what’s happening. A feeling type person may engage their thinking function when they sense their feelings are fully understood. But if a person’s preferred function satisfies the need of the situation, the person won’t engage the opposite function even though the ability lurks below the surface of conscious awareness.
While twentieth century science mostly ignored the unconscious, it treated consciousness itself as a subject unfit for scientific inquiry. Science has long been dominated by materialism – the philosophy that everything that exists is composed of matter, and mental processes were simply functions and actions of brain cells using electrical and chemical communication. The brain existed – the “mind” did not, or it was a phantom that could not be studied scientifically. But in the latter part of the century Francis Crick, the decoder of DNA, became involved in the scientific study of consciousness. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, the author of The Consciousness Instinct and many other related books, has researched the subject for over fifty years.
The interaction of consciousness and the unconscious mind is even more difficult to examine and understand than the study of consciousness. There is a mysterious dance between them that may be the quantum physics of the psyche, a fascinating phenomenon to contemplate, perhaps ultimately unknowable. But Jung definitely felt that the human psyche had a meaningful structure with a dynamic relationship between its parts. He thought the brain was a network of neural connections with an unconscious base that includes autonomic and instinctual wiring, neural connections from habit development which can operate unconsciously, as well as wiring that enables conscious reasoning and imagination. Much of the brain’s activity is likely automatic with neural pathways that we’re born with that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, even going back many millions of years into pre-human animal evolution. If we had to be conscious of all our psychological functioning, we’d be so paralyzed with thinking we’d have no time to even feed ourselves.
Besides a lower-case self that usually designates a person’s conscious image of who they are – a function of the ego (the conscious director in the psyche, not the person’s sense of their worth), Jung postulated an upper case Self, which he described as a center of organization and integration in the unconscious psyche, and also as source of unconscious wisdom and spirituality. Jung cited one source of evidence for the Self in the pervasive presence of mandala images in cultures throughout history and throughout cultures all over the modern world, in developed civilizations and in primitive cultures, which he gave extensive examples of. He believed those images were expressions of the harmonious and balanced integration of the psyche. Jungian psychologist Robert Moore describes the ego as the general of the psyche, in America embodied in the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is subordinate to the President as Commander in Chief. So in Jung’s view the ego, especially in the second half of life, serves the Self. The ego is also the mediator between the internal world of the unconscious, with the Self and the deep imagination, and the external environment. The ego is what translates the deep wisdom of the Self into practical terms to function in the external world.
So that is the dance we do, and we do it unconsciously or with some degree of awareness of what is going on. Part of the ego’s job is to know when to listen to the “still, small voice” coming from below in the unconscious that runs counter to the ego’s inclination, and when to dismiss it as a voice from such things as unrealistic fears, greed, or a desire to feel superior, rather than the Self. Jung believed the unconscious was vastly more than the repository of repressed unpleasant contents the ego rejects that Freud said it was. Still, those contents are definitely a part of the unconscious, and they always try to reassert their influence in what’s called “the return of the repressed.” Jung never thought the ego was insignificant. Its essential function is to somehow manage the squabbling menagerie down below and know who to pay attention to and who to tell “Thank you for sharing, but I don’t think that’s helpful right now.” The ego is the adult in the room, but it needs to pay attention to the wise old man or woman who lives in the back of the house. The dance between consciousness and the unconscious is how the human psyche operates, whether we’re aware of what we’re doing or not. But it does help to have some idea, as much as we can, of what’s going on.
Me and You
It’s just me and you here in this moment,
you who are always with me,
faithful and true like skin, like my breath.
I didn’t always know you as myself,
didn’t always think of you as an ally.
But I’ve learned,
though I sometimes don’t like what you bring me.
When I was young, I thought it was just me,
although in the beginning it was only you
until I was conscious and aware.
I walk through this life mostly aware of only me
but in truth I grew out of your invisible depths
in the dawn of my being while you remained silent.
It’s hard to grasp that I’m your child.
Most of the time I believe it's me driving the car,
but from time to time you rear your head
and let me know you’re there,
and it’s often your hands on the steering wheel, I think.
I’m a bit in awe of you, but I’m wary
because you’re not exactly benign.
You’re the depths of my being,
but you’re a little scary,
because I don’t know what’s down there.
I feel you walking behind me, sometimes at my side,
and yet you lead the way like an invisible ghost.
All I create comes ultimately from your hands,
from depths I’m only vaguely aware of,
depths I don’t know the breadth or bottom of.
I'm just saying hello, letting you know
I know you’re there.
Brett Nelson
_______________________________________________
The Ego and the Still Small Voice
It’s been said that the ego is an excellent servant but a terrible master. I’m talking about the ego as a fundamental part of the psyche, our conscious decision maker and action originator, and the sense of who we are consciously aware of being, rather than the sense of worth and power ("getting a big head" is an inflation of the ego). Psychologist Robert Moore likened the ego to the general of the psyche, rather than the Commander in Chief, as in the US president who has the ultimate authority in the US government to approve or direct what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense do. Who is the Commander in Chief in the human psyche? Carl Jung believed in and provided extensive evidence for a part of our unconscious mind which he labeled the Self that is a source of intuitive wisdom that we all have, if we know how to relate to it and read what it tells us. It’s become custom to capitalize it to distinguish it from the self we are aware of and consider ourselves to be, more akin to the ego or self-image.
Virtually everyone has probably had the experience of having an intuitive thought that provided an insight or solution to a problem without having a sense of where the thought came from or how it was arrived at, because it wasn’t something that was reasoned or “thought out.” The Greek mathematician Archimedes is reported to have had an instantaneous scientific insight as he stepped into his bath and saw the water rise. He may have reasoned out the language to state his scientific principle later, but the insight apparently was an instantaneous reaction to a visual experience that legend has it made him yell “Eureka [I have found it]” and run naked through the streets proclaiming his discovery. Such an insight may come in a dream or a daydream. The German chemist Friedrich Kekule said the structure of the benzene molecule came to him while daydreaming as an image of a uroboros (a snake eating its tail}, an ancient symbol in many cultures from ancient China to ancient Egypt and Greece. Again, the idea wasn’t a product of deliberate thought but a spontaneous, sudden insight when letting his mind wander in a state of reverie.
I recall recently waking up with an instant recognition of how judgmental I can be of people who have different values without any reflection on what might be valid in their point of view, in spite of thinking of myself as a nonjudgmental person who is rarely black-and-white in my thinking. I woke up with the insight immediately in my mind, without any memory of dreaming anything related to it. I’ve also had experiences of having a memory I was trying to retrieve, the words I was trying to find for a line of poetry, or the answer to a problem or decision come to me hours or days later when I gave up thinking about what I was searching for and focused my mind on other things or let my mind wander.
This doesn’t mean that directed, logical process thinking isn’t important and extremely valuable. It absolutely is. Our reasoning powers are used productively for most of us on a daily basis, but they don’t always work to give the answers we’re after, or they give us “answers” that don’t work for us. Our military strategies based on successful World War II tactics did not work no matter how much we bombed North Vietnamese supply lines on the Ho Chi Minh Trail or burned Vietnamese villages we suspected of supporting Viet Cong. We didn’t think the “hearts and minds” of the people were important. The idea that consumers are rational decision makers that would act in their own economic self-interest has often given us policies that didn’t produce the economic results we expected. Economic patterns appear to operate from emotional factors and at times don’t even function in a person’s own best economic interests. Maybe that’s why economics has been called “the dismal science.”
This raises the question of how much we can rely on what our intuition and unconscious minds tell us. But consider: the human unconscious is the result of billions of years of evolution that reaches ultimately back to the beginning of cell specialization in bacteria that resulted in the development of separate cells into different organs. So the brain is the network of all the connections that have evolved in successive species over all that time that proved advantageous for survival. As a result, it includes many instinctual functions that do not involve conscious deliberation as well as neural wirings that don’t dictate specific instinctual reactions but give us the potential for a range of possible behaviors that had survival value at some time in the past. It helps to understand that Darwin’s concept of natural selection was not the “survival of the fittest” in the sense of who could kill and eat or outrun whom, but that our evolutionary development proceeded on the basis of who survived long enough to produce offspring, along with mutations which helped that. Some think that social skills involving cooperative behavior were the most important factor that allowed human evolution to progress.
We’re therefore endowed with mental networks which facilitate behavior patterns that had survival value at some point in our evolutionary development but may not always be helpful now. We live indoors protected from large predatory animals because we've exterminated them in areas where most of us reside. We also have highly organized, mostly cooperative societies with police to enforce generally agreed on rules for acceptable behavior – the "social contract" – primarily to govern the tendencies toward violence and theft that humans have.
In spite of that we have instinctual reactions to perceived threats which may or may not be real and so don’t always work to our advantage – the fight-or-flight response. If I think there’s a tiger in the bushes along my path but there’s no tiger there, I survive if I avoid that path, even when there’s no need to. But if I think there’s no tiger in the bushes and there really is, I'll die. So there’s a degree of survival value in being a little paranoid, which also operates in us now in response to threats to our economic well-being, to our social status, or to our sense of self-worth. And if I have a history of experiencing violence, I may be hypersensitive to perceived threats and often perceive danger where there is none, or have an inordinate fear response in innocuous situations, fostering a chronic anxiety that interferes with living an effective life. This is what we call PTSD.
Our unconscious minds are networks of neural patterns that give us perceptual and behavioral tendencies with various degrees of accuracy and usefulness, as well as instant information that comes from the biological wisdom of eons of natural selection which has proved so advantageous that human beings have incorporated it into genetically programmed wiring in the nervous system. It’s no accident that we have the unconscious wisdom to know things that we don’t know we know and that surprise us when they rise to the surface of consciousness.
The problem then becomes: 1) how do I access the wisdom my unconscious mind has? and 2) how do I sort out the messages that tell the truth from the perceptions and impulses that were once reliably accurate and helpful but are no longer or rarely useful in my environment today? This is the point where the human ego steps in to play its role. After all, consciousness has developed through natural selection too. Jung and the psychologist Julian Jaynes proposed that humans did not always think the way we do, perhaps not until ancient Greece in the West. Jung believed that until that time, mental functioning was mostly a matter of perception -- a passive reception of information from the environment, combined with mostly unconscious decision-making, reacting from instinct in behaviors which were not consciously chosen or reasoned out. We mostly perceived and reacted rather than deliberated and made conscious choices. There were surely exceptions evidenced by the development of technologies like the bow and arrow, the wheel, planting for food, etc. But those would come from people with a reflective consciousness outside of the norm, much like the Da Vincis and Einsteins of modern times. The inventors of those technologies were the geniuses who could “think outside the box” and “dream of things that never were and ask ‘Why not?’” instead of just reacting without reflection.
We carry in us all that neural wiring for primitive perception and reflexive decision-making as well as our higher-order mental abilities. Sometimes they show up when we least expect it and may not be helpful. The most important functions of the ego are 1) to act as a filter to sort out what messages and impulses from the unconscious are useful wisdom and which are not and 2) to act as a mediator between the unconscious and the imagination on the one hand, and the objective environment we live in, on the other – the reality function. The unconscious dreams of possibilities. The ego deals with practical realities. We need both.
For many of us, our feeling-self resides largely in our unconscious minds, though this also depends on personality type. Most men and some women are more conscious of their thinking processes than their emotions. Alternatively, most women and some men are more conscious of their emotional reactions and deeply felt values than most men and some women, although there are men and women of both types and neither preference is more natural or effective even if more common. When stressed, we will usually give precedence to values which are most emotionally weighted, sometimes wondering why we did something we didn’t plan to do or intend. Under normal conditions, we rely on our preferred mode, either our thinking or feeling function.
We have intuitive reactions that “feel right,” even though at times they may go against what our rational minds tell us is true or what our values tell us to do, if we are open to them. It’s the ego’s job to decide when the “still small voice” is right. To do that, it needs an openness of mind and degree of flexibility. Rigidity breeds stagnation. The person who can’t change his mind is like the boulder that water simply flows around. It doesn’t stop the water from reaching the sea. Rigidity comes from categorical thinking – “this is always right or this is always true, and that is always wrong or false.” Rigidity also comes from what we’re taught and what the norm and custom in our culture is, and from “habit.” And it comes from fear of the unknown and fear of the judgment of others for straying from custom and the conventional – “That's not the way it’s done.”
Just as there is a degree of truth in a cliché, there is usually a degree of effectiveness in custom and convention. But conditions of life change, and old ways of doing things may lose their viability and require a different response. New technologies and new understandings in science require trying new ways of thinking and doing things. As William Blake said, “What is now proved true, was once only imagined.” If we only did things the way we’ve always done, we’d still be living in caves or pit houses. But we’re not, and we’re deeply indebted to those who had the flexibility to use their intuition and think outside the box of received wisdom and convention, and then figure out how to apply their intuitive insights in a practical way.
Brett Nelson
Trees: Almost Human
Trees are the members of the plant kingdom that feel most human to me. I love trees! Juniper – including alligator juniper, pinyon, bigtooth and Rocky Mountain maple, Gambel oak, cottonwood, mesquite, ponderosa, Douglas fir, quaking aspen, corkbark fir and limber pine on the crest of the Sandias – they seem to have personalities. In my fantasy life I can almost imagine them hearing my thoughts about their beauty or majestic size and sending back silent acknowledgement of my appreciation. I feel toward trees as I would toward any other sentient being, including feelings of respect, appreciation, admiration, curiosity, even love. But then I feel that way toward almost anything in the natural world, even stone. I think it’s no coincidence that there is a song titled “I Talk to the Trees” in Paint Your Wagon, and there are trees that walk and talk and aid Frodo Baggins and his allies in their fight against the Orc armies of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. There are talking trees in myths from India to Greece to Ethiopia to Ireland, some as oracles.
The most common tree throughout New Mexico where I live is juniper, with four species in the Sandia Mountains and the foothills: one-seed juniper, Rocky Mountain juniper, Utah juniper, and alligator juniper. The Forest Service estimates that one quarter of the state is covered by juniper forest. They grow abundantly in the high desert foothills, with a range of 3500-7000 feet throughout the state, living up to 300-400 years.
The higher mountains from about 7000 feet up are mostly covered in overlapping but ascending order in pinyon pine, ponderosa pine, white and Douglas fir, quaking aspen – flourishing where forest fires clear out the conifers until the evergreens grow back, and Engelman spruce, plus corkbark fir and limber pine near the crest of the Sandias. Cottonwoods cover the lowland areas near streams and rivers, along with coyote willow, screwbean mesquite and even mulberry along the Rio Grande, plus invasive Russian olive and salt cedar. There are also areas of Rocky Mountain maple and bigtooth maple with brilliant autumn reds and yellows in the Manzano Mountains southeast of Albuquerque, as well as Gambel oak throughout most of the mountain ranges of New Mexico, also colorful in the fall. The Sandias contain four of the seven climate zones from the Upper Sonoran and Transition zone to the Canadian and Hudsonian zones, so in effect you can travel from Mexico to Canada in the Sandias.
Quaking aspens are especially remarkable in that hundreds to thousands of trees in a given area grow from a single root that spreads to sprout trees all around it, which spread roots to sprout more and more trees. In the Wasatch Mountains of Utah an aspen forest with a single root system has been calculated to have over 47,000 trees covering 106 acres. It’s claimed to be the world’s largest living organism, as well as being one of the world’s oldest organisms at 14,000 years old. They quickly take over areas where evergreen forest has been eradicated by fire, until the slower growing fir and spruce can come back and take over, shutting out sunlight for the aspens, so you can see entire hillsides covered in gold in autumn where fires have cleared away the conifers.
Another remarkable tree present on the crest of the Sandia Mountains is limber pine. Limber pines grow on dolomitic soils, frequently in severe conditions at the crest of mountains. Like the long-lived bristlecone pines in the Sierras, one of which has been verified at 4855 years as the oldest individual of any species, limber pines grow to great age. The age of one in Saskatchewan with a circumference of 185” was extrapolated from a core sample to be 3000 years old. Others have been confirmed to be 1140 to 1700 years and one “documented” to be over 2000 years. They can grow as tall as 65-80 feet but are typically stunted when they grow at treeline. The ones I’ve photographed on the edge of Sandia Crest were 15-20 feet tall, with branches growing mostly in the leeward direction. They’re the Desert Fathers of tree species, living austerely in harsh conditions where few species can survive.
Ponderosas are the opposite, growing tall and straight at middle elevations around 7500-8500 feet. They’re the middle America of evergreens, like the maple and oak of broadleaf trees. They spread the forest floor with their needles, minimizing the underforest cover and often creating a park-like forest with lots of open space. They’re sometimes called vanilla pine due to the fragrance of their bark. Their long needles and regular crowns make them attractive trees that create a peaceful aura. Another interesting small tree found in the lower Sandia slopes and foothills is mountain mahogany, with spiraling feather-like white plumes that extend from the branches.
The Fremont cottonwoods that line the banks of the Rio Grande and other permanent and intermittent watercourses away from mountains have become one of my favorite trees as I’ve discovered the network of trails in the Rio Grande Bosque (bosque is Spanish for forest). Often knobby and twisting, they also sometimes grow tall and straight when close together, making a pretty and pleasant forest to hike through. In the same genus as aspen with leaves that are very similar, they flutter in the wind like aspen and turn bright gold with the coming of autumn, then a golden brown as the season progresses. The bosque is a ribbon of gold in early fall, a cheery sight to see every year. Cottonwoods often grow in unexpected directions. Sometimes their trunks will even turn and grow horizontally near the ground, but more commonly limbs twist in surprising directions, creating a wildness in their appearance that I love, making for striking photographs at times. Bare trees in winter reveal the profuse growth of very small branches at the end of larger branches, looking like brushes.
The other trees that turn brilliant gold in autumn in the bosque are mesquite trees, which I thought of as growing only in Texas. They’re generally small trees, but I’ve seen some twenty to perhaps twenty-five feet tall. Some mesquite trees have bean pods that can be as long as fifteen inches. They can also have wickedly sharp dark red thorns up to at least three inches. You can even find mulberry trees with delicious fruit in the Bosque north of Rio Bravo Boulevard in the south valley.
Maria Popova’s online post in The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), of 1/22/2023 about trees’ intelligence and wisdom branches itself like a tree into link after connected link from a multitude of sources with a mind-expanding network of awareness. It connects to a fascinating TED Talk by forest ecology researcher Suzanne Simard detailing her research findings with Douglas fir in British Columbia showing how a forest is not just a collection of trees, but a highly sophisticated underground network of chemical information-sharing much like a brain. They have “hub trees” or “mother trees” which monitor and nurture and protect younger trees, especially seedlings, to grow and sustain a forest over time. Fungal networks connect the roots of trees and carry nutrients like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, amino acids, and water to the trees that need them most, supplying the fungi with sugars in a symbiotic relationship. She points out how clear-cutting destroys the network over time and spreads disease, resulting in the monster forest fires we are seeing in the 21st century.
So a forest is an organism with a brain, not a collection of individual trees, with strands of fungus making connecting roots like the neurons in my brain. They even use glutamate, the most common neurotransmitter in the human brain. So I think it’s not surprising that I seem to feel a presence when I walk through a forest and have something like a silent conversation with them, not in words but more like in feelings and attitudes of appreciation, respect, and recognition of their individual personalities. And I’m not entirely sure they’re not listening in some way science can’t yet fathom. At least it pleases me to imagine so.
