September 3, 2025 • 40 mins
What if transforming into a tree was not a punishment but a conscious, enriching choice? Join us as we explore this intriguing concept with our guest, Sumana Roy, author of "How I Became a Tree." Sumana shares her personal journey towards identifying with trees, driven by a longing to escape the emotional turbulence of human existence. Through our conversation, we uncover the profound philosophical and emotional connections humans can form with the natural world and challenge the notion of transformation by finding peace and meaning in adopting a tree-like existence.
This week’s episode was written and recorded in New York on the land of the Lenape tribes.
This episode was written, edited, and produced by Jonathan Zautner.
To learn more about our podcast and episodes, please visit treespeechpodcast.com and consider supporting us through our Patreon - every contribution supports our production, and we’ll be giving gifts of gratitude to patrons of all levels. Please also consider passing the word, and rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts. Every kind word helps.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:05):
Across cultures and centuries, myths of humans transforming
into trees appear again and again.
When I first encountered these stories in Greek mythology, they
unsettled me. Daphne becomes a Laurel to
escape Apollo's relentless pursuit, and Dryopi, once a
(00:28):
Princess, plucks flowers from a Lotus tree, unaware it was once
the nymph Lotus. The tree bleeds, and at once her
own body begins to change beforeher husband and sister's eyes.
Her face disappears beneath bark, her arms stretch into
branches. With her last words, Dryopi begs
(00:51):
them to raise her son with reverence for trees, for any
tree, she warns, may be the dwelling place of a goddess.
I'm Jonathan Zoutner, and this is tree speech.
As a child, I read these myths as tales of punishment, fates
worse than death, to be rooted, silenced, turned to wood for
(01:17):
eternity. But my long.
Held Perspective. Shifted recently after reading
How I Became a Tree by Shumana Roy.
A luminous blend of memoir, philosophy, and literary
history, Roy invites us to imagine what she calls tree
time, a slower, more patient rhythm of being that stands in
(01:41):
contrast to the speed and violence of human life.
Her book reminds us that trees have always been more than
background. They are teachers, companions,
and models of endurance and stillness.
In today's episode, I speak withShimana Roy about what it might
truly mean to become a tree and of the importance and
(02:05):
possibility of embracing tree time to benefit our daily lives.
A little bit of background aboutour guest.
Shimana Roy is a writer, poet, and professor of creative
writing at Ashoka University in India, where she also works with
the Indian Plant Humanities Project.
(02:26):
Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in countless
journals, and she is the author of several books, including the
acclaimed How I Became a Tree, the novel Missing and My
Mother's Lover, and Other Stories.
This summer, Shumana joined me from the Himalayan foothills
while I spoke from New York City.
(02:48):
You may hear a bit of backgroundsound from both our worlds,
which I hope will add to the richness of this conversation.
Step closer. This is tree speech.
Let's listen. Welcome, Shumana.
(03:11):
I am so honored to speak with you today about your life and
your books, including How I Became a Tree And here on
Treespeech, we have explored speaking for and with trees,
communing with trees, listening to trees, and honoring,
studying, and including trees inmany facets of our lives.
(03:32):
But we have never explored becoming a tree.
And I think I shield away from this because in my youth I came
across 2 instances in literaturewhere people either became or
were turned into trees and both were violent and upsetting to
me. And so I sort of stayed away
from the subject matter. But reading your book and now
(03:53):
speaking with you, I think will definitely rewrite my fears of
becoming a tree. So I would like to start with
the question of what drew you tothe idea of becoming a tree.
Not just writing about trees, but actually identifying with
them. I wish I knew, Jonathan.
Perhaps it's a good thing I don't actually.
(04:14):
So I really don't know how my analogical imagination and
behaviour came to be, came to exist.
I have no memory of writing about plants with any degree of
conscious focus or attention, but let me try and tell you how
I began writing it. I cannot specify what it was,
(04:37):
you know, that had made me feel injured by human life, by the
social, by things around me. And I wanted to abandon the
social. Could I live like I'd asked
myself? A ceiling fan?
A cell phone? No, I didn't want to be a
machine. No, I wanted to escape the
emotional economy of humans and other animals.
(05:00):
What then? It was then that it struck me
that perhaps living like a tree was the only route out of
whatever it was that I wanted toescape.
And I realise only in retrospectnow that it was pretty stupid of
me. This journey that you know, had
come to me about 15 years ago. I would say that I began to
(05:25):
identify characteristics of plant life that I wanted to
imbibe. And in doing so I began to ask
myself, was I abnormal in harbouring such an uncommon
ambition to become a tree? So that was the question, that
was I abnormal in harbouring such an ambition.
(05:46):
So I kept it a secret from the world, from my family, from
friends. But what I began doing was
looking for people, writers, artists, thinkers, scientists,
philosophers who had exhibited asimilar ambition.
How I became a tree is a documentation, I think of that
(06:07):
search, an emotional, intellectual and spiritual
desire to live like a tree. Your book starts with a glorious
chapter relating to tree time, which is going about the world
in a way that doesn't actually measure time, at least not in
the ways we are accustomed to inour modern lives.
(06:29):
And I now wholeheartedly believein tree time, and I'm trying to
get the rest of the world to agree.
You write about tree time as an antidote to human urgency.
What does tree time mean to you?I'm smiling, you know, I'm
listening to your question, you know, the phrase three time came
(06:52):
to me, I think, from a sense of deprivation.
And I'm very happy to see it's adoption and adaptation in
various books and essays, of course.
But every time I encounter the phrase now, I realise that this
is an ideal, an extremely human centred understanding of time
(07:15):
and almost an unachievable one. I'll tell you how this came to
me. It came to me while I was on a
bus, on the highway, on a commute from home to work.
Or it might have been from work to home looking at land being
taken over by real estate developers, trees being filled,
(07:38):
agricultural land being snatchedto make homes and farmhouses for
the wealthy. And as I say in How I Became a
Tree, it was impossible to forcethe plants and trees in these
construction sites to grow, eventhough the buildings could grow
with the energy of concrete and capital.
(07:58):
Tree time, That phrase is an aspiration.
It is meant to remind me. And now that you say you're part
of the group, so it is meant to remind me and maybe us of the
comparatives and superlatives that make time seem like a
toothpaste, Like a tube of toothpaste that we can squeeze
(08:19):
at will and demand, hurry, rush,speed.
A tree, a plant, grass, anythingfrom the natural world is not a
tube of toothpaste. So tree time, I posit against
that kind of understanding of time.
And that's very difficult in ourculture, which seems obsessed
(08:39):
with speed and output. What does it mean to choose
stillness? Can slowness be radical or
healing? And how practical is it?
How? How might we begin to implement
this tree time into our daily lives?
It is hard because I think most of us have the desire, but not
the means to resist the speed that bulldozes our lives.
(09:03):
Our livelihoods seem to have become dependent on speed, not
slowness. No employer sends us an A note
of appreciation for being slow, as we know.
You'd have noticed that anythingthat comes from a culture of
slowness, whether it's art or genres of music, literature,
(09:27):
gardening, sewing, knitting, cooking, all of these have been
relegated to a position of beggarliness where we need to
beg from possible patrons, whoever that might be, you know,
the state or the agencies for their time and indulgence so
(09:48):
that we could live and create from this culture of slowness.
One way, since your question is about resistance, one way of
resisting this, I suppose, and Jonathan, I say this only from
the very limited perimeter of myown experience.
So one way of resisting this is perhaps to pay attention.
I've said this often to my students that attention is
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affection, and by noticing, by observing, observing anything
and everything for anything and everything is really worth our
attention, we notice how alive we are.
This awareness of being alive islike a rush of blood.
It keeps us aware and alert for joyfulness, which is what I
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think our ambition is, our shared, common, universal, if I
may use that word, that ambitionis for joy and joyfulness is a
form of alertness. So I think we need to resist to
be able to partake of this joy. It's so important and and
enhances our lives in so many ways.
(10:58):
Going a little deeper with that joyful awareness, then, can you
tell us how does Tree Time influence your own writing
process or way of moving throughout the world?
Here I must confess that this has been told to me by quite a
few people that the rhythm of tree time is often the rhythm of
(11:21):
my attention. Both attention, because both
attention and distraction are for me, often the same thing.
Being distracted is also a form of attention and an act of
noticing. So while speaking to you, when
we began talking the set up on Zoom, the settings in Zoom is
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such that it's only the foreground that we are actually
meant to notice. That means that I was supposed
to only look at your face, but Iasked you a question about a
statue of the Buddha in the background.
So I was distracted for a moment.
And I I think that distraction is also very necessary to the
(12:10):
process of attention. And that for me, is also how I
understand honesty. Honesty in writing, honesty in
any form of creative practice. So it dictates.
This understanding of honesty and its relationship with
attention and distraction dictates how I live and love and
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write and create and who knows, maybe even how I sleep.
I I love that. I'm glad that you brought that
up. It's interesting because the
world is full of distractions, but also set up to take those
distractions away. And before you came on, I, I was
playing with my backgrounds and you can blur the background and
I had that for a moment. So you wouldn't have been able
(12:56):
to see anything there. And the reason I unblurred it
is, is yes, to give you that visual.
Maybe there's something to look at to find peace or to have a
thought or or inspiration or something like that.
I think it's analogous to what Matthew Hall calls plant
blindness, that after this conversation, it is possible
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that I would remember you and the Buddha always together.
Sometimes thinking of the Buddhaand the artwork on the wall that
you have in your room in the background, sometimes you would
notice that you come back from meeting someone.
And if someone were to ask you, if your partner were to ask you
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what were the trees in the drawing room or the living room,
chances are we often forget because like the Buddha in the
background, like the Zoom settings, which asks us to blur
the background, a part of our human conditioning has been to
blur the trees, the plant life out of our consciousness.
(14:01):
So because we're talking about plant life and attention and
distraction, I think all of these come together in the way
we experience and enjoy the world in its fullness, rather
than just with focus. Focus, I think is a very
capitalist word and we must try to wean ourselves away from
(14:23):
focus. Also, being focused all the time
might be damaging to our nervoussystem.
And that fullness also means truth, as you were speaking
about before, just being honest with.
Who? Who?
Who I am, What is on my wall? This.
Is this is me? Yes.
Well, we're talking about blurring backgrounds.
(14:44):
So that leads me to AI, which I'm is coming up in all of our
worlds. I'm sure as an author, a writer,
a teacher, that AI comes into discussions and things that you
have probably all of the time. As we increasingly blur the
lines between human and machine,your work and your book
(15:06):
encourages us to blur the lines instead between human and plant.
What do you think gets revealed when we shift that boundary
instead? It's a wonderful question.
Thank you, Jonathan. It might, It must, be my
unarticulated conditioning in something I took for granted,
(15:31):
something that must have been inthe air when I was growing up,
that derived from a manner of thinking and living that
imagines or believes that life is in everything.
It is perhaps because of my growing up in this culture of
thinking that I'm unable to see boundaries that differentiate
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one species from another. By this I do not mean that a
human is a plant, or that a plant is a machine and so on.
I mean that I see more convergences than dissonance.
The human imagination is one of the most remarkable machines we
have. We can become anyone and
(16:13):
anything, and yet we seem to limit ourselves in trying to
become only like members of our species.
We've had a few rhetorical devices that facilitate such
thinking, even if they imply transferring human registers to
other species. These effective registers are
(16:37):
also now being imported in the sciences so that scientists can
declare today, like they did in March 2023, that plants cry.
It's the word that they that thescientists use, that plants cry
if they are not watered for morethan two days.
Maybe empathy is the world I'm looking for, but it's a limited
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shorthand for what I feel. I become them.
I become them all and it is hardto live as a human because I'm
reminded in words and gestures and of course by public
policies. And you know, both written and
unwritten, that this is neither possible nor desirable, this
(17:20):
analogical understanding of lifeforms.
But it is important in, you know, to go to your question as
much as we recognise boundaries and create policies recognizing
the rights of every species, I think the reason we once went to
fiction to imagine other lives, if we were able to import that
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aspect, that facility of the imagination into our day-to-day
lives, something would happen that would enrich us and the
world we live in. So if more people embraced
becoming a tree, even metaphorically, how do you
think? Our world would change.
(18:06):
I'll I'll try to explain this with a very simple example.
In India, for instance, as I imagine, in many other places in
the world, trees and forests arecut for what the government
calls development, to build roads and airports and highways
and industries. People like you and me,
protesters, we are pacified witha ludicrous line of reasoning.
(18:31):
The government tells us we will plant 500 trees in some other
place to make up for this loss. Can one say this to a human?
I'll kill your three children, but I'll ensure that three
humans are born to some other mother in that neighborhood.
So becoming a tree, to use your phrase, and mine, would show up
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this line of thinking to be ridiculous and of course,
heartless. If we were to become the trees,
we would not be able to do this.Right.
And it it goes into seeing our relationship with trees and the
natural world in such a different way as being connected
as as part of us. Yeah.
(19:15):
So taking that into into reading, how might reading like
a tree absorbing, slowly metabolizing over time change
the way we take in news, conflict or even social media?
Again, let me use this word attention.
(19:37):
I tell my students that's my religion.
And those who ask about how I write like this, or how I notice
what I do, I think it has to do with attention.
It might also be aloneness. I don't feel lonely, but I do
feel alone and quite often a misfit everywhere I find myself
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among people who derive their power from their religious or
national or racial identity. The obsession with news, which
is basically a form of abstraction.
The reason? It is easy to pass off anything
as news. The nation fetish, you know,
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whether it's America or India, we're going through that stage.
The fetishisation of the nation,the supremacy of our individual
nations, all these macro level things that actually do not
annotate how we live from momentto moment.
I don't look at an Ashuta tree braving its head out of a crack
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in a wall and think, ah, brave Indian tree.
I'm not aware of being attentive.
That consciousness of being attentive would destroy the
rewards of attention. I've had the habit of looking at
and often photographing walls inmy hometown as I walk through
neighborhoods. In fact, just before speaking to
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you, I was taking a walk in through a neighborhood adjacent
to the one that I live in. There's always something new.
Like there is always something new in a bird's nest, a new
branch, something collected fromsomewhere.
No one planted these things for me.
I don't go looking for them, butI end up noticing them.
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They make me smile. What other reward does one need
to stay alive? I also find myself noticing the
wind a lot. It sounds what it causes to all
the forms around me. So I, I think I import very
unconsciously or subconsciously,this understanding, this
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experience of living in the world to reading and writing
practices of my own. And I want to say because you
asked about social media and thenews, I don't watch the news and
I don't read newspapers for the news anymore.
I stopped about 12 years ago when I found that the
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distinction between news and what is called fake news almost
did not exist anymore. One of my reasons for wanting to
become a tree was its indifference to the news cycle.
As I say in that section, the frenetic speed of the news
cycle, the new studio, the new sticker.
It's like living on a treadmill,the nervous system perennially
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agitated. There is no rest.
A tree, as I said in the book, is a daily wage earner invested
in the present. We could try to read and write
and create like that to the rhythm of living time.
There are rewards to be had there, like a tree that changes
with the seasons. The rewards of reading might be
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more natural and dependent on the weather as well, instead of
the inert publicity driven reading lists that rule our
reading habits. In the book Becoming a Tree, you
write many reflections on genderand care, and I'm wondering how
did the book or did the book help you rethink your
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relationship to the body or to softness?
As well as safety. Yes, Sir, I know why you
mentioned safety, I think in thefirst page or the first
paragraph of the book. I wrote it a long time ago and I
don't remember it here. Safety, particularly in in South
Asian cultures where, you know, women are not really safe, not
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during the day and certainly notafter sundown.
It was a scholar of care who pointed this out to me.
What you said just now that careseems to be a primary access
around which my thoughts and feelings run.
This too might come from a senseof deprivation.
Perhaps because I sought care and needed it immensely at
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certain periods in my life and didn't get it, I became a person
who wanted to be a carer or caregiver to whoever I could.
A school friend of mine, her name is Reshmi, told me a few
years ago that she remembers this about me from when I was
little in school. So caring is a natural instinct,
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at least for me, and I have the superstitious belief that if
everyone is well, everyone around me, by which I mean this
entire neighborhood of this planet, if everyone is well, I
will be well too. So there's a form of self
sensiveness in my desire to carefor those I know and also don't
know. I have to tell you this.
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This often irritates my family and friends.
They use a phrase, an idiom in Bangla, for my actions.
It's called opatridan. In a rough translation, it would
be giving or donating to a person or place that is
undeserving of such philanthropy.
I, I, I, I don't know. That's poor translation.
(25:03):
I suppose my response to that is, does a tree deny us its
goodness and generosity because we are bad people?
If you're a good person, the tree will give you shade.
If I'm a bad person, the tree will give me shade as well.
So to answer your question, my care extends to all, to
everyone, like the trees does. It is identity agnostic about my
(25:27):
relationship with the body. Well, I wish I was more plant
like, more indifferent to judgement about my appearance,
invested only in my health, which is how I imagine trees
grow and find form. And yes, I'd like to imagine and
believe that a tree isn't as exhausted as I am, in spite of
the cycles of recuperation and recovery that it has to go
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through periodically. I do want to to touch on your
latest book as well, which is entitled Plant Thinkers of 20th
Century Bengal and within the book you explore how Bengali
writers and philosophers drew insight from plant life.
It's a wonderful book filled with numerous stories of people
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from from various walks of of life and and how plants and
trees were a part of their of their daily lives.
In your words, what makes someone a plant thinker?
The phrase isn't mine, Jonathan.I owe it to Michael Murder, who
used it for a cluster of philosophers who had thought
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about plants the way most had about the human.
I suppose I borrowed it from Michael to write about a lineage
of thought, about plant life that I thought was peculiar to a
moment in history in 20th century Bengal.
Also, I was importing the term plant thinker to not think of
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professional philosophers like Michael Madder had written, but
scientists, artists, poets, writers, film makers, none of
whom were environmentalists, butpeople who at that time were
formed by a certain kind of plant philosophy that was in the
air. That's what I think of plant
thinkers and I think there are lots of plant thinkers in the
(27:20):
world around us. And these are not necessarily
professional plant, professionalbotanists or professional
philosophers. And it's important to have their
voices heard. And before we began recording,
that is why I said thank you fordoing something such as this
podcast, that we have an archivewhere we can go to listen to
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different ways of thinking aboutplant life.
So I would say to answer your question, all the people you've
spoken to for the sport podcast would be plant thinkers.
Yes, and I think your books alsoencourage people to be plant
thinkers. They it also I think plants the
seed, for lack of a better term,for people to become plant
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thinkers as well because it is awealth of ideas and inspirations
having to do with trees. But from your specific
perspective is made universal and and I think I would imagine
anyone reading the book will find parts of themselves within
it as well. How I Became a Tree was first
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published in 2017. How has your relationship with
trees evolved since writing the book?
Friends and strangers, and now from all across the world, they
send me photos and news and research reports about new
discoveries about plant life. It's as if they're informing me
(28:49):
about a relative. I feel very touched by these
messages and these photos. I work in the garden more than I
have ever before. Last year I saw Pomegranate's
flower in the garden for the first time in my life.
My relationship with plants and trees and grass and Moss is
outside the ambition and logistics of ownership, of
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control and proprietorship. I find it calming to be in such
a relationship and I'm I feel grateful to have had this
opportunity to record my thoughts about the plant world,
about plants. I think without having gone
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through this process of recording these thoughts, I
might not have gotten to where Iam, and not just in relationship
with the plant world, but this relationship with myself as
well. If the book.
Were being published today. Are there ideas or reflections
you might add or change? It is possible that I would have
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called the book How I Became Grass and not How I Became a
Tree, for it was only a few years after the book was
published that it occurred to methat it wasn't really a tree
that I had wanted to become. It was grass, the rhizome jibon.
Anando Das's grass. This poet I write about in plant
(30:16):
thinkers of 20th century Bengal.Whitman's grass, Leaves of
grass, delus and guitarist grass, and the grass grass
outside my window that I wanted to become.
I also realized that the structure of the book, where you
can read any section and in any order, that it wasn't a
narrative where one page must follow another.
(30:38):
This was rhizomatic, so I'd probably call it that.
I love that. I'm glad you called it How I
Became a Tree. But maybe there's another book.
Maybe that's the the sequel. Beautiful.
Well, Shumana, thank you so muchfor joining us today.
Your writing and works have sparked our imaginations and
(30:59):
shown us a better, more sustainable and joyful way to
live. We appreciate the way you blend
such academic rigor and creativethinking with inspiring wonder
and an appreciation for life andthe deep connection that is
innate in all living things. So this conversation has really
been a pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you for having me on your podcast, Jonathan.
(31:21):
I enjoyed speaking with you verymuch.
Shumana's words are going to stay with me for a long time.
She gave us so much to think about, to question, to turn over
in our minds. What I keep coming back to is
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her focus on attention and distraction and how both can
shape the joy we find in everyday life.
And then there's the idea of tree time.
It feels so different from the way I usually move through my
days, ruled by schedules, calendars, and clocks.
I'm always asking myself, how long will it take if I go this
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way instead of that, or how fastcan I get my work done, or how
little sleep can I get away withso I can stay up to watch a
movie? Tree Time turns all of that
upside down and it makes me wonder, what would it mean for
me to live more like a tree? That question also resonated
(32:26):
with our very own Dory Robinson,who is deeply moved by Shumanis
chapter on tree Time. I'm so glad.
She's going to share her own reflection with us.
Now let's listen. I am always late.
(32:46):
Unless it's a rehearsal, a recording session or class I'm
behind. Maybe it's ADHD, maybe it's
people pleasing, maybe it's the illusion that 10 spare minutes
can hold one more task. But inevitably I lose myself in
the present moment, thereby derailing the next.
(33:09):
Reading Tree Time struck me deeply the idea that trees have
their own time and are never late, never early, simply
evolving exactly as they are meant to according to their
roots, the sun and the rain theyreceive, the air they breathe
and the soil they grow in. Their algorithm is entirely
(33:30):
their own and cannot be rushed or slowed.
Who would scold a tree for growing too slowly or blossoming
too soon? Sometimes we choose change, and
sometimes change overtakes us. Five years ago, on my birthday,
I had resolved to figure out howto have a child on my own.
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I'd always imagined raising a child with a partner, but
several relationships and an ungodly amount of dates later, I
had not found my person. I was single, aware of time
passing, and worried that the window might close.
Then COVID arrived and time stopped.
My search froze. The first time I realized my
(34:17):
perception of time had changed was during the height of the
pandemic. Suddenly, we were all forced to
slow down. The urgency of commuting, the
daily scramble of life, the crowded schedules fell away.
We had no choice but to move at a different pace.
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Time might have stopped in the outside world, but it continued
to accelerate inside me. I felt late, desperate to catch
up. The moment I could return to
working in person. I threw myself into the deep
end, determined to succeed as a professional theatre artist,
pushing myself to prove that I belonged.
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Rehearsal schedules became my clock curtain.
Time is my calendar. It was thrilling to lose myself
in gig after gig, but beneath the energy was a quiet wreath.
I had filled the space where a child might have been with a
rush of constant motion. I had replaced growth for
busyness, arrival for applause. But even trees, in their long
(35:22):
wisdom, do not try to bear fruitin every season.
All the while, my body whisperedits own warnings.
Brain fog, extra pounds, heightened emotions.
Friends spoke about life changes, and Instagram offered
an endless scroll of supplementsand advice.
Do this before it's too late. I panicked, desperate to keep
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blooming. But trees do not panic.
They understand that rest is as essential as fruiting.
When I am most consumed by my phone is when I am at my worst.
Doom scrolling convinces me thatI am perpetually behind, but the
trees wait patiently outside my window while I scroll.
(36:07):
Their time is unchanged, unhurried even as I try to
outpace my own. And then, thankfully, I finally
step outside. I notice the birches, the Pines,
the oak. They leaf, fruit, rest and shed
in their own rhythm. Last week, my nephew bravely
(36:29):
left for college, and I am unbelievably proud of him.
When he was born, I'd imagine that my children would be just a
few years behind him, that the cousins would play together side
by side at holidays. But last week, as he rightfully
began a new chapter, I realized that this door had closed.
(36:50):
Perhaps I may still have children in some way, shape or
form, but the time for the cousins to be playmates is over.
That particular time has passed.I can't help but feel hollowed
out, as if time has removed my insides.
But I am reminded that some trees bear fruit for only 25
(37:11):
years, a blink in a centuries long life.
Their cycles come as they come, and me, I still ache to bloom in
ways I wish I had 10 years ago. Yet I will try to hold grief in
one hand, an abundance in the other.
Friendships, creative kin, a home and a garden.
(37:33):
All the roles I love. Daughter, sister, aunt, teacher,
director, storyteller. I will try to breathe, to trust
that my becoming has its own rhythm, its own cycle.
If I know anything about trees, it is this.
They will not rush me. They will simply stand with me
(37:58):
in the season I am in. As we bring today's episode to a
close, I keep returning to the way Shumana's How I Became a
Tree asks us to see the world differently, to notice the
spaces between attention and distraction, to imagine time not
(38:22):
as a clock but as a living rhythm.
Her words, along with Dory's reflection, remind us that
becoming more like a tree isn't about leaving our human lives
behind. It's about allowing ourselves to
slow down, to root more deeply, and to discover joy in the
(38:43):
simple act of being present. Thank you for joining us and for
listening, truly listening, in Tree Time.
Until next time, may you find a moment of stillness and maybe
even a little wonder in the trees around you.
(39:07):
This week's episode was written and recorded in New York on the
land of the Lenape Tribes. This episode was written,
edited, and produced by JonathanZoutner with Dory Robinson.
To learn more about our podcast and episodes, please visit
treespeechpodcast.com and consider supporting us through
our Patreon. Every contribution supports our
(39:30):
production. Please also consider passing the
word and rating and reviewing uson Apple Podcasts.
Every kind word helps. A heartfelt thanks to Shumana
Roy for joining us. Look for her book How I Became a
Tree wherever books and audio books are sold.
(39:50):
And thank you for joining Tree Speech today.
Across cultures and centuries, myths of humans transforming
into trees appear again and again.
When I first encountered these stories in Greek mythology, they
unsettled me. Daphne becomes a Laurel to
escape Apollo's relentless pursuit, and Dryopi, once a
(00:28):
Princess, plucks flowers from a Lotus tree, unaware it was once
the nymph Lotus. The tree bleeds, and at once her
own body begins to change beforeher husband and sister's eyes.
Her face disappears beneath bark, her arms stretch into
branches. With her last words, Dryopi begs
(00:51):
them to raise her son with reverence for trees, for any
tree, she warns, may be the dwelling place of a goddess.
I'm Jonathan Zoutner, and this is tree speech.
As a child, I read these myths as tales of punishment, fates
worse than death, to be rooted, silenced, turned to wood for
(01:17):
eternity. But my long.
Held Perspective. Shifted recently after reading
How I Became a Tree by Shumana Roy.
A luminous blend of memoir, philosophy, and literary
history, Roy invites us to imagine what she calls tree
time, a slower, more patient rhythm of being that stands in
(01:41):
contrast to the speed and violence of human life.
Her book reminds us that trees have always been more than
background. They are teachers, companions,
and models of endurance and stillness.
In today's episode, I speak withShimana Roy about what it might
truly mean to become a tree and of the importance and
(02:05):
possibility of embracing tree time to benefit our daily lives.
A little bit of background aboutour guest.
Shimana Roy is a writer, poet, and professor of creative
writing at Ashoka University in India, where she also works with
the Indian Plant Humanities Project.
(02:26):
Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in countless
journals, and she is the author of several books, including the
acclaimed How I Became a Tree, the novel Missing and My
Mother's Lover, and Other Stories.
This summer, Shumana joined me from the Himalayan foothills
while I spoke from New York City.
(02:48):
You may hear a bit of backgroundsound from both our worlds,
which I hope will add to the richness of this conversation.
Step closer. This is tree speech.
Let's listen. Welcome, Shumana.
(03:11):
I am so honored to speak with you today about your life and
your books, including How I Became a Tree And here on
Treespeech, we have explored speaking for and with trees,
communing with trees, listening to trees, and honoring,
studying, and including trees inmany facets of our lives.
(03:32):
But we have never explored becoming a tree.
And I think I shield away from this because in my youth I came
across 2 instances in literaturewhere people either became or
were turned into trees and both were violent and upsetting to
me. And so I sort of stayed away
from the subject matter. But reading your book and now
(03:53):
speaking with you, I think will definitely rewrite my fears of
becoming a tree. So I would like to start with
the question of what drew you tothe idea of becoming a tree.
Not just writing about trees, but actually identifying with
them. I wish I knew, Jonathan.
Perhaps it's a good thing I don't actually.
(04:14):
So I really don't know how my analogical imagination and
behaviour came to be, came to exist.
I have no memory of writing about plants with any degree of
conscious focus or attention, but let me try and tell you how
I began writing it. I cannot specify what it was,
(04:37):
you know, that had made me feel injured by human life, by the
social, by things around me. And I wanted to abandon the
social. Could I live like I'd asked
myself? A ceiling fan?
A cell phone? No, I didn't want to be a
machine. No, I wanted to escape the
emotional economy of humans and other animals.
(05:00):
What then? It was then that it struck me
that perhaps living like a tree was the only route out of
whatever it was that I wanted toescape.
And I realise only in retrospectnow that it was pretty stupid of
me. This journey that you know, had
come to me about 15 years ago. I would say that I began to
(05:25):
identify characteristics of plant life that I wanted to
imbibe. And in doing so I began to ask
myself, was I abnormal in harbouring such an uncommon
ambition to become a tree? So that was the question, that
was I abnormal in harbouring such an ambition.
(05:46):
So I kept it a secret from the world, from my family, from
friends. But what I began doing was
looking for people, writers, artists, thinkers, scientists,
philosophers who had exhibited asimilar ambition.
How I became a tree is a documentation, I think of that
(06:07):
search, an emotional, intellectual and spiritual
desire to live like a tree. Your book starts with a glorious
chapter relating to tree time, which is going about the world
in a way that doesn't actually measure time, at least not in
the ways we are accustomed to inour modern lives.
(06:29):
And I now wholeheartedly believein tree time, and I'm trying to
get the rest of the world to agree.
You write about tree time as an antidote to human urgency.
What does tree time mean to you?I'm smiling, you know, I'm
listening to your question, you know, the phrase three time came
(06:52):
to me, I think, from a sense of deprivation.
And I'm very happy to see it's adoption and adaptation in
various books and essays, of course.
But every time I encounter the phrase now, I realise that this
is an ideal, an extremely human centred understanding of time
(07:15):
and almost an unachievable one. I'll tell you how this came to
me. It came to me while I was on a
bus, on the highway, on a commute from home to work.
Or it might have been from work to home looking at land being
taken over by real estate developers, trees being filled,
(07:38):
agricultural land being snatchedto make homes and farmhouses for
the wealthy. And as I say in How I Became a
Tree, it was impossible to forcethe plants and trees in these
construction sites to grow, eventhough the buildings could grow
with the energy of concrete and capital.
(07:58):
Tree time, That phrase is an aspiration.
It is meant to remind me. And now that you say you're part
of the group, so it is meant to remind me and maybe us of the
comparatives and superlatives that make time seem like a
toothpaste, Like a tube of toothpaste that we can squeeze
(08:19):
at will and demand, hurry, rush,speed.
A tree, a plant, grass, anythingfrom the natural world is not a
tube of toothpaste. So tree time, I posit against
that kind of understanding of time.
And that's very difficult in ourculture, which seems obsessed
(08:39):
with speed and output. What does it mean to choose
stillness? Can slowness be radical or
healing? And how practical is it?
How? How might we begin to implement
this tree time into our daily lives?
It is hard because I think most of us have the desire, but not
the means to resist the speed that bulldozes our lives.
(09:03):
Our livelihoods seem to have become dependent on speed, not
slowness. No employer sends us an A note
of appreciation for being slow, as we know.
You'd have noticed that anythingthat comes from a culture of
slowness, whether it's art or genres of music, literature,
(09:27):
gardening, sewing, knitting, cooking, all of these have been
relegated to a position of beggarliness where we need to
beg from possible patrons, whoever that might be, you know,
the state or the agencies for their time and indulgence so
(09:48):
that we could live and create from this culture of slowness.
One way, since your question is about resistance, one way of
resisting this, I suppose, and Jonathan, I say this only from
the very limited perimeter of myown experience.
So one way of resisting this is perhaps to pay attention.
I've said this often to my students that attention is
(10:12):
affection, and by noticing, by observing, observing anything
and everything for anything and everything is really worth our
attention, we notice how alive we are.
This awareness of being alive islike a rush of blood.
It keeps us aware and alert for joyfulness, which is what I
(10:36):
think our ambition is, our shared, common, universal, if I
may use that word, that ambitionis for joy and joyfulness is a
form of alertness. So I think we need to resist to
be able to partake of this joy. It's so important and and
enhances our lives in so many ways.
(10:58):
Going a little deeper with that joyful awareness, then, can you
tell us how does Tree Time influence your own writing
process or way of moving throughout the world?
Here I must confess that this has been told to me by quite a
few people that the rhythm of tree time is often the rhythm of
(11:21):
my attention. Both attention, because both
attention and distraction are for me, often the same thing.
Being distracted is also a form of attention and an act of
noticing. So while speaking to you, when
we began talking the set up on Zoom, the settings in Zoom is
(11:46):
such that it's only the foreground that we are actually
meant to notice. That means that I was supposed
to only look at your face, but Iasked you a question about a
statue of the Buddha in the background.
So I was distracted for a moment.
And I I think that distraction is also very necessary to the
(12:10):
process of attention. And that for me, is also how I
understand honesty. Honesty in writing, honesty in
any form of creative practice. So it dictates.
This understanding of honesty and its relationship with
attention and distraction dictates how I live and love and
(12:34):
write and create and who knows, maybe even how I sleep.
I I love that. I'm glad that you brought that
up. It's interesting because the
world is full of distractions, but also set up to take those
distractions away. And before you came on, I, I was
playing with my backgrounds and you can blur the background and
I had that for a moment. So you wouldn't have been able
(12:56):
to see anything there. And the reason I unblurred it
is, is yes, to give you that visual.
Maybe there's something to look at to find peace or to have a
thought or or inspiration or something like that.
I think it's analogous to what Matthew Hall calls plant
blindness, that after this conversation, it is possible
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that I would remember you and the Buddha always together.
Sometimes thinking of the Buddhaand the artwork on the wall that
you have in your room in the background, sometimes you would
notice that you come back from meeting someone.
And if someone were to ask you, if your partner were to ask you
(13:40):
what were the trees in the drawing room or the living room,
chances are we often forget because like the Buddha in the
background, like the Zoom settings, which asks us to blur
the background, a part of our human conditioning has been to
blur the trees, the plant life out of our consciousness.
(14:01):
So because we're talking about plant life and attention and
distraction, I think all of these come together in the way
we experience and enjoy the world in its fullness, rather
than just with focus. Focus, I think is a very
capitalist word and we must try to wean ourselves away from
(14:23):
focus. Also, being focused all the time
might be damaging to our nervoussystem.
And that fullness also means truth, as you were speaking
about before, just being honest with.
Who? Who?
Who I am, What is on my wall? This.
Is this is me? Yes.
Well, we're talking about blurring backgrounds.
(14:44):
So that leads me to AI, which I'm is coming up in all of our
worlds. I'm sure as an author, a writer,
a teacher, that AI comes into discussions and things that you
have probably all of the time. As we increasingly blur the
lines between human and machine,your work and your book
(15:06):
encourages us to blur the lines instead between human and plant.
What do you think gets revealed when we shift that boundary
instead? It's a wonderful question.
Thank you, Jonathan. It might, It must, be my
unarticulated conditioning in something I took for granted,
(15:31):
something that must have been inthe air when I was growing up,
that derived from a manner of thinking and living that
imagines or believes that life is in everything.
It is perhaps because of my growing up in this culture of
thinking that I'm unable to see boundaries that differentiate
(15:52):
one species from another. By this I do not mean that a
human is a plant, or that a plant is a machine and so on.
I mean that I see more convergences than dissonance.
The human imagination is one of the most remarkable machines we
have. We can become anyone and
(16:13):
anything, and yet we seem to limit ourselves in trying to
become only like members of our species.
We've had a few rhetorical devices that facilitate such
thinking, even if they imply transferring human registers to
other species. These effective registers are
(16:37):
also now being imported in the sciences so that scientists can
declare today, like they did in March 2023, that plants cry.
It's the word that they that thescientists use, that plants cry
if they are not watered for morethan two days.
Maybe empathy is the world I'm looking for, but it's a limited
(16:58):
shorthand for what I feel. I become them.
I become them all and it is hardto live as a human because I'm
reminded in words and gestures and of course by public
policies. And you know, both written and
unwritten, that this is neither possible nor desirable, this
(17:20):
analogical understanding of lifeforms.
But it is important in, you know, to go to your question as
much as we recognise boundaries and create policies recognizing
the rights of every species, I think the reason we once went to
fiction to imagine other lives, if we were able to import that
(17:45):
aspect, that facility of the imagination into our day-to-day
lives, something would happen that would enrich us and the
world we live in. So if more people embraced
becoming a tree, even metaphorically, how do you
think? Our world would change.
(18:06):
I'll I'll try to explain this with a very simple example.
In India, for instance, as I imagine, in many other places in
the world, trees and forests arecut for what the government
calls development, to build roads and airports and highways
and industries. People like you and me,
protesters, we are pacified witha ludicrous line of reasoning.
(18:31):
The government tells us we will plant 500 trees in some other
place to make up for this loss. Can one say this to a human?
I'll kill your three children, but I'll ensure that three
humans are born to some other mother in that neighborhood.
So becoming a tree, to use your phrase, and mine, would show up
(18:54):
this line of thinking to be ridiculous and of course,
heartless. If we were to become the trees,
we would not be able to do this.Right.
And it it goes into seeing our relationship with trees and the
natural world in such a different way as being connected
as as part of us. Yeah.
(19:15):
So taking that into into reading, how might reading like
a tree absorbing, slowly metabolizing over time change
the way we take in news, conflict or even social media?
Again, let me use this word attention.
(19:37):
I tell my students that's my religion.
And those who ask about how I write like this, or how I notice
what I do, I think it has to do with attention.
It might also be aloneness. I don't feel lonely, but I do
feel alone and quite often a misfit everywhere I find myself
(19:59):
among people who derive their power from their religious or
national or racial identity. The obsession with news, which
is basically a form of abstraction.
The reason? It is easy to pass off anything
as news. The nation fetish, you know,
(20:20):
whether it's America or India, we're going through that stage.
The fetishisation of the nation,the supremacy of our individual
nations, all these macro level things that actually do not
annotate how we live from momentto moment.
I don't look at an Ashuta tree braving its head out of a crack
(20:42):
in a wall and think, ah, brave Indian tree.
I'm not aware of being attentive.
That consciousness of being attentive would destroy the
rewards of attention. I've had the habit of looking at
and often photographing walls inmy hometown as I walk through
neighborhoods. In fact, just before speaking to
(21:03):
you, I was taking a walk in through a neighborhood adjacent
to the one that I live in. There's always something new.
Like there is always something new in a bird's nest, a new
branch, something collected fromsomewhere.
No one planted these things for me.
I don't go looking for them, butI end up noticing them.
(21:23):
They make me smile. What other reward does one need
to stay alive? I also find myself noticing the
wind a lot. It sounds what it causes to all
the forms around me. So I, I think I import very
unconsciously or subconsciously,this understanding, this
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experience of living in the world to reading and writing
practices of my own. And I want to say because you
asked about social media and thenews, I don't watch the news and
I don't read newspapers for the news anymore.
I stopped about 12 years ago when I found that the
(22:04):
distinction between news and what is called fake news almost
did not exist anymore. One of my reasons for wanting to
become a tree was its indifference to the news cycle.
As I say in that section, the frenetic speed of the news
cycle, the new studio, the new sticker.
It's like living on a treadmill,the nervous system perennially
(22:26):
agitated. There is no rest.
A tree, as I said in the book, is a daily wage earner invested
in the present. We could try to read and write
and create like that to the rhythm of living time.
There are rewards to be had there, like a tree that changes
with the seasons. The rewards of reading might be
(22:48):
more natural and dependent on the weather as well, instead of
the inert publicity driven reading lists that rule our
reading habits. In the book Becoming a Tree, you
write many reflections on genderand care, and I'm wondering how
did the book or did the book help you rethink your
(23:09):
relationship to the body or to softness?
As well as safety. Yes, Sir, I know why you
mentioned safety, I think in thefirst page or the first
paragraph of the book. I wrote it a long time ago and I
don't remember it here. Safety, particularly in in South
Asian cultures where, you know, women are not really safe, not
(23:34):
during the day and certainly notafter sundown.
It was a scholar of care who pointed this out to me.
What you said just now that careseems to be a primary access
around which my thoughts and feelings run.
This too might come from a senseof deprivation.
Perhaps because I sought care and needed it immensely at
(23:58):
certain periods in my life and didn't get it, I became a person
who wanted to be a carer or caregiver to whoever I could.
A school friend of mine, her name is Reshmi, told me a few
years ago that she remembers this about me from when I was
little in school. So caring is a natural instinct,
(24:18):
at least for me, and I have the superstitious belief that if
everyone is well, everyone around me, by which I mean this
entire neighborhood of this planet, if everyone is well, I
will be well too. So there's a form of self
sensiveness in my desire to carefor those I know and also don't
know. I have to tell you this.
(24:41):
This often irritates my family and friends.
They use a phrase, an idiom in Bangla, for my actions.
It's called opatridan. In a rough translation, it would
be giving or donating to a person or place that is
undeserving of such philanthropy.
I, I, I, I don't know. That's poor translation.
(25:03):
I suppose my response to that is, does a tree deny us its
goodness and generosity because we are bad people?
If you're a good person, the tree will give you shade.
If I'm a bad person, the tree will give me shade as well.
So to answer your question, my care extends to all, to
everyone, like the trees does. It is identity agnostic about my
(25:27):
relationship with the body. Well, I wish I was more plant
like, more indifferent to judgement about my appearance,
invested only in my health, which is how I imagine trees
grow and find form. And yes, I'd like to imagine and
believe that a tree isn't as exhausted as I am, in spite of
the cycles of recuperation and recovery that it has to go
(25:50):
through periodically. I do want to to touch on your
latest book as well, which is entitled Plant Thinkers of 20th
Century Bengal and within the book you explore how Bengali
writers and philosophers drew insight from plant life.
It's a wonderful book filled with numerous stories of people
(26:14):
from from various walks of of life and and how plants and
trees were a part of their of their daily lives.
In your words, what makes someone a plant thinker?
The phrase isn't mine, Jonathan.I owe it to Michael Murder, who
used it for a cluster of philosophers who had thought
(26:36):
about plants the way most had about the human.
I suppose I borrowed it from Michael to write about a lineage
of thought, about plant life that I thought was peculiar to a
moment in history in 20th century Bengal.
Also, I was importing the term plant thinker to not think of
(26:57):
professional philosophers like Michael Madder had written, but
scientists, artists, poets, writers, film makers, none of
whom were environmentalists, butpeople who at that time were
formed by a certain kind of plant philosophy that was in the
air. That's what I think of plant
thinkers and I think there are lots of plant thinkers in the
(27:20):
world around us. And these are not necessarily
professional plant, professionalbotanists or professional
philosophers. And it's important to have their
voices heard. And before we began recording,
that is why I said thank you fordoing something such as this
podcast, that we have an archivewhere we can go to listen to
(27:44):
different ways of thinking aboutplant life.
So I would say to answer your question, all the people you've
spoken to for the sport podcast would be plant thinkers.
Yes, and I think your books alsoencourage people to be plant
thinkers. They it also I think plants the
seed, for lack of a better term,for people to become plant
(28:07):
thinkers as well because it is awealth of ideas and inspirations
having to do with trees. But from your specific
perspective is made universal and and I think I would imagine
anyone reading the book will find parts of themselves within
it as well. How I Became a Tree was first
(28:28):
published in 2017. How has your relationship with
trees evolved since writing the book?
Friends and strangers, and now from all across the world, they
send me photos and news and research reports about new
discoveries about plant life. It's as if they're informing me
(28:49):
about a relative. I feel very touched by these
messages and these photos. I work in the garden more than I
have ever before. Last year I saw Pomegranate's
flower in the garden for the first time in my life.
My relationship with plants and trees and grass and Moss is
outside the ambition and logistics of ownership, of
(29:12):
control and proprietorship. I find it calming to be in such
a relationship and I'm I feel grateful to have had this
opportunity to record my thoughts about the plant world,
about plants. I think without having gone
(29:33):
through this process of recording these thoughts, I
might not have gotten to where Iam, and not just in relationship
with the plant world, but this relationship with myself as
well. If the book.
Were being published today. Are there ideas or reflections
you might add or change? It is possible that I would have
(29:54):
called the book How I Became Grass and not How I Became a
Tree, for it was only a few years after the book was
published that it occurred to methat it wasn't really a tree
that I had wanted to become. It was grass, the rhizome jibon.
Anando Das's grass. This poet I write about in plant
(30:16):
thinkers of 20th century Bengal.Whitman's grass, Leaves of
grass, delus and guitarist grass, and the grass grass
outside my window that I wanted to become.
I also realized that the structure of the book, where you
can read any section and in any order, that it wasn't a
narrative where one page must follow another.
(30:38):
This was rhizomatic, so I'd probably call it that.
I love that. I'm glad you called it How I
Became a Tree. But maybe there's another book.
Maybe that's the the sequel. Beautiful.
Well, Shumana, thank you so muchfor joining us today.
Your writing and works have sparked our imaginations and
(30:59):
shown us a better, more sustainable and joyful way to
live. We appreciate the way you blend
such academic rigor and creativethinking with inspiring wonder
and an appreciation for life andthe deep connection that is
innate in all living things. So this conversation has really
been a pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you for having me on your podcast, Jonathan.
(31:21):
I enjoyed speaking with you verymuch.
Shumana's words are going to stay with me for a long time.
She gave us so much to think about, to question, to turn over
in our minds. What I keep coming back to is
(31:43):
her focus on attention and distraction and how both can
shape the joy we find in everyday life.
And then there's the idea of tree time.
It feels so different from the way I usually move through my
days, ruled by schedules, calendars, and clocks.
I'm always asking myself, how long will it take if I go this
(32:04):
way instead of that, or how fastcan I get my work done, or how
little sleep can I get away withso I can stay up to watch a
movie? Tree Time turns all of that
upside down and it makes me wonder, what would it mean for
me to live more like a tree? That question also resonated
(32:26):
with our very own Dory Robinson,who is deeply moved by Shumanis
chapter on tree Time. I'm so glad.
She's going to share her own reflection with us.
Now let's listen. I am always late.
(32:46):
Unless it's a rehearsal, a recording session or class I'm
behind. Maybe it's ADHD, maybe it's
people pleasing, maybe it's the illusion that 10 spare minutes
can hold one more task. But inevitably I lose myself in
the present moment, thereby derailing the next.
(33:09):
Reading Tree Time struck me deeply the idea that trees have
their own time and are never late, never early, simply
evolving exactly as they are meant to according to their
roots, the sun and the rain theyreceive, the air they breathe
and the soil they grow in. Their algorithm is entirely
(33:30):
their own and cannot be rushed or slowed.
Who would scold a tree for growing too slowly or blossoming
too soon? Sometimes we choose change, and
sometimes change overtakes us. Five years ago, on my birthday,
I had resolved to figure out howto have a child on my own.
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I'd always imagined raising a child with a partner, but
several relationships and an ungodly amount of dates later, I
had not found my person. I was single, aware of time
passing, and worried that the window might close.
Then COVID arrived and time stopped.
My search froze. The first time I realized my
(34:17):
perception of time had changed was during the height of the
pandemic. Suddenly, we were all forced to
slow down. The urgency of commuting, the
daily scramble of life, the crowded schedules fell away.
We had no choice but to move at a different pace.
(34:37):
Time might have stopped in the outside world, but it continued
to accelerate inside me. I felt late, desperate to catch
up. The moment I could return to
working in person. I threw myself into the deep
end, determined to succeed as a professional theatre artist,
pushing myself to prove that I belonged.
(34:58):
Rehearsal schedules became my clock curtain.
Time is my calendar. It was thrilling to lose myself
in gig after gig, but beneath the energy was a quiet wreath.
I had filled the space where a child might have been with a
rush of constant motion. I had replaced growth for
busyness, arrival for applause. But even trees, in their long
(35:22):
wisdom, do not try to bear fruitin every season.
All the while, my body whisperedits own warnings.
Brain fog, extra pounds, heightened emotions.
Friends spoke about life changes, and Instagram offered
an endless scroll of supplementsand advice.
Do this before it's too late. I panicked, desperate to keep
(35:46):
blooming. But trees do not panic.
They understand that rest is as essential as fruiting.
When I am most consumed by my phone is when I am at my worst.
Doom scrolling convinces me thatI am perpetually behind, but the
trees wait patiently outside my window while I scroll.
(36:07):
Their time is unchanged, unhurried even as I try to
outpace my own. And then, thankfully, I finally
step outside. I notice the birches, the Pines,
the oak. They leaf, fruit, rest and shed
in their own rhythm. Last week, my nephew bravely
(36:29):
left for college, and I am unbelievably proud of him.
When he was born, I'd imagine that my children would be just a
few years behind him, that the cousins would play together side
by side at holidays. But last week, as he rightfully
began a new chapter, I realized that this door had closed.
(36:50):
Perhaps I may still have children in some way, shape or
form, but the time for the cousins to be playmates is over.
That particular time has passed.I can't help but feel hollowed
out, as if time has removed my insides.
But I am reminded that some trees bear fruit for only 25
(37:11):
years, a blink in a centuries long life.
Their cycles come as they come, and me, I still ache to bloom in
ways I wish I had 10 years ago. Yet I will try to hold grief in
one hand, an abundance in the other.
Friendships, creative kin, a home and a garden.
(37:33):
All the roles I love. Daughter, sister, aunt, teacher,
director, storyteller. I will try to breathe, to trust
that my becoming has its own rhythm, its own cycle.
If I know anything about trees, it is this.
They will not rush me. They will simply stand with me
(37:58):
in the season I am in. As we bring today's episode to a
close, I keep returning to the way Shumana's How I Became a
Tree asks us to see the world differently, to notice the
spaces between attention and distraction, to imagine time not
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as a clock but as a living rhythm.
Her words, along with Dory's reflection, remind us that
becoming more like a tree isn't about leaving our human lives
behind. It's about allowing ourselves to
slow down, to root more deeply, and to discover joy in the
(38:43):
simple act of being present. Thank you for joining us and for
listening, truly listening, in Tree Time.
Until next time, may you find a moment of stillness and maybe
even a little wonder in the trees around you.
(39:07):
This week's episode was written and recorded in New York on the
land of the Lenape Tribes. This episode was written,
edited, and produced by JonathanZoutner with Dory Robinson.
To learn more about our podcast and episodes, please visit
treespeechpodcast.com and consider supporting us through
our Patreon. Every contribution supports our
(39:30):
production. Please also consider passing the
word and rating and reviewing uson Apple Podcasts.
Every kind word helps. A heartfelt thanks to Shumana
Roy for joining us. Look for her book How I Became a
Tree wherever books and audio books are sold.
(39:50):
And thank you for joining Tree Speech today.
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