»When Mother Trees die, they pass their wisdom to their kin.«
〰 Suzanne Simard 〰
January 25, 2024 marks the New Year for Trees in the Jewish Calendar.
This post is dedicated to Nora, my father’s first cousin, who lost both parents within two weeks after her birth during WWI and grew up as my father’s ‘older sister’.
“When Mother Trees die, they pass their wisdom to their kin, Suzanne Simard writes in her book The Mother Tree. ~ “generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape. It’s what all parents do.”
Nora’s mother died in childbed. I wonder what wisdom she passed on to her baby daughter when she died.
Nora’s father died two week’s later in a military hospital somewhere in France.
“If a tree falls in the forest there are other trees listening,” Peter Wohlleben writes in his book The Hidden Life of Trees.
I wonder who was listening when Nora’s father fell in battle in WWI.
Nora’s mother was English. Between the wars she spent some years with her maternal family in London. Being fluent in English and German, Nora was later called upon as an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials ~ an American war tribunal held in Nuremberg at the end of WWII.
At the Trials, Nora met an American Rabbi, who attended as a psychoanalyst/ expert-witness. He offered emotional support when she broke down, overwhelmed and traumatised by all the horrors. They ended up getting married and moved to California.
»Love is like a tree. It sprouts forth of itself, sends its roots out deeply through our whole being, and often continues to flourish greenly over a heart in ruins.«
〰 Victor Hugo 〰