Beyond the offering of their beauty, aspen groves provide an invitation to better understand ourselves. Found where there is ample sunlight and in cooler, higher climates in North America, aspen trees are deciduous (drops its leaves in winter) with smooth, white bark marked by black scars where their lower branches have self-pruned through the natural growth of the tree. Wearing their heart-shaped, shiny green leaves on their branches, they turn beautiful colors of yellow, gold and orange in autumn. Often confused with birch trees, aspen bark doesn’t peel like the bark of birch trees do.
Aspens don’t survive in solitude. A lone seedling is the source of it’s origin, but you won’t find an aspen standing in a field, solitary and alone. The tree is always part of a larger organism, interconnecting all the trees in the grove underground, beyond view. Connected through a vast root system, when one aspen tree dies, the remainder of the colony survives and another will grow from the supporting system below ground to replace it. The entire colony cycles together. The trees bloom and shift autumn colors together – sounding a single harmonious note into the autumn symphony of change. An individual aspen lives from between 50 – 150 years, but the entire colony can live for many thousands of years supported by the foundational root system. A colony in Utah (named Pando) is estimated to be somewhere around 80,000 years old.
In many ways aspen groves remind me of the whole of humanity. Up close, we each seem to be isolated and individual. But, when examined more closely ~ at the at the level of origin, we don’t exist in solitude. We are apparently single outward expressions of a larger, interconnected being. This is the source of our nourishment, supporting our cycle of birth and death. While heart-shaped aspen leaves flutter in the breeze our similar emotional tremors, as emotional beings, flutter in the breezes of life’s changes and alterations. Aspen groves remind us that our separateness is an illusion and that the truth of union lies just beneath the surface. We are all interconnected, interdependent, and cycling with the seasons in harmonious rhythm.
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