intricacies of care
When the trees in the Cascade Mountain range in Washington state are lacking, trees as far away as British Columbia, Canada send help. Through the intricate systems of moss, mushrooms, ferns, and roots that connect them, nutrients flow from one forest to the other. When pests attack, messengers are sent along the same routes: beware, thicken up your bark, take care. When the trees in British Columbia, Canada are under duress, the favor is returned. The border means nothing to them. They don’t hoard their resources for themselves. They don’t worry about having enough for the next season. They are generous. 
Recently, my daughter, Emilie, moved to Baltimore. She knew absolutely not a soul there. Emilie has made some bold moves in her ten years since graduating from college: Malawi to volunteer for a year, a 12-month assignment in the Democratic Republic of Congo with Doctors without Borders, and London during the pandemic for graduate school. But she either knew someone or had a built in team she was joining when she made each of these moves. There’s nothing like spending the holidays in the safe room with your Doctor’s Without Borders colleagues, satellite phone at the ready, because kidnapping is more common during the holiday season, to fast track a bond. Not to detract from moving to a new continent, culture, and language, but she had a base or a team of some kind to help her settle into a community. Not so with Baltimore. Nobody.
But like the network of trees, through the intricate system of relationships she’s built over the continents and years, life-giving help was on its way. A friend from her work in Malawi from 2016 and her husband whom Emilie had never met, came from 45 minutes away. They brought her to their home for a weekend. Since then, they make a regular habit of going to the Sunday farmer’s market together. Another friend from her graduate school in London knows someone in Washington D.C. who has a friend in Baltimore. She came and took her out to dinner with a group of friends. Em has a friend from high school in Brooklyn, New York who was house sitting on the upper east side of NYC for a weekend, so she took the train to “help” with the tough task. When I was visiting, she and I were walking into a coffee shop and saw someone she knew from high school sitting outside. She’d also just moved there to start residency at Johns Hopkins, where Emilie is also working. Another connection. Like is the case with everywhere she’s moved, including in the Congo, Emilie has found multiple soccer teams to play on. In Baltimore, she’s added Galic Football to the list. She’s building on and relying on her root systems, and they are sending aid.
Recently, I read a book about keystone species; wolves and salmon really stood out to me. It always astounds me when I find deeper and deeper consistencies in God’s creation, from the trees, to the animals, to the humans; we’re meant to care for each other. Salmon are born in mountain rivers and streams and they return to the same place to spawn and die. The farther away from the ocean they are born, the bigger, stronger, and meatier they grow to be. Delicate pink salmon are born very close to the ocean because they do not need the size, strength, and vigor of a steel head or king to make the arduous journey back deep into the mountains in order to spawn. Along these mountain rivers and streams, the salmon need tall trees to keep the water shaded and cool enough for them to survive. De-forestation is a real threat to their ability to make it back. The salmon carry with them nutrients from the ocean plant life they fed on while deep in the Pacific that the mountain trees need. When the bears eat the fish and go poop in the woods, it feeds the trees. When the fish make it all the way home, if the river is clean enough, cold enough, and not blocked up too much by a dam, the very trees that shade its path are nourished. And then they can lay their eggs and die for their carcasses to decompose and further deposit needed nutrients from the depths of the ocean. This is the trouble with fisheries. If a salmon is hatched from a fishery, to the fishery it will return and the forest will not benefit from what it brings back from the ocean. When the salmon don’t make it, the domino effect is sobering. Not just for the forest by the stream, but for the forests across the mountains with nutrient-poor bear poop and across the border that may be in need when there will be nothing to send through the root systems.
My mind is racing with the applications of this. Having spent so many years working in education, this is usually the first stream I think of. The pandemic revealed so much of what we already knew about the effects disparities in resources can have on a child’s ability to engage in learning. Not having an adult speak words to a child, or breakfast before school, or a safe place to sleep each night will thwart a child’s ability to learn. When everyone went home to learn online, what if you couldn’t get online, what if you got stuck and there was no one there to help because those kiddos’ grown-ups were trying to keep the food on the table and the lights on instead of helping with school? These are just a few of the needs. With my kids working in health care, mental health, and global health, these are also important streams I’m keenly aware of. When mental health funding was federalized by the Kennedy administration in the 1960s, it was never fully funded. Then the Reagan administration sent it back to the states, who weren’t equipped to properly fund the care. Hospitals and facilities started closing. Access to mental health care is tough, particularly for lower income families. The implications for the unhoused are significant. Since this shift, the number of unhoused people across the nation has quadrupled. Of course, this is far more complex, but the correlations are clear. More shade is needed for this stream, particularly for veterans who have sacrificed so much to defend democracy, regardless of their personal stance on any one of the conflicts they found themselves fighting.
Caring for each other is a part of what it means to be a part of God’s creation. It doesn’t matter if the person looks or believes like you do. Honoring what is good and beautiful and true in each and every part of God’s creation is necessary for all of it to thrive. When Emilie was investing in her relationship with Molly while volunteering in Malawi in 2016, she never imagined she’d find herself needing a friend in Baltimore in 2022. When she lived in a cement walled compound topped with barbed-wire in the middle of a conflict zone in the DRC with a team of medical providers treating not only the hundreds of thousands in the refugee camp nearby but also the twelve waring gangs perpetuating the violence, she never imagined one of those colleagues would know someone in D.C. who would take her out for dinner with their friends three years later. She lives her life to be a tree shading others’ streams, no matter who they are, to the best of her ability and she sends whatever nutrients she has to anyone she knows is in need. And it is coming back to her. And it’s beautiful.
