It’s always fascinating to me how a single book can change your entire perspective about something you’ve encountered all your life.

Take Elif Shafak’s ‘The Island of Missing Trees’ for example. Ever since I read it, I’ve been looking at trees in an entirely different light. Trees are no longer just another form of life that lives beside me on the planet. They’re beings. They feel, and they communicate.

Every time I look at a tree now, especially the old and massive ones, I imagine what stories it might want to tell us. What joys, sorrows, celebrations, prayers, anxieties it must have witnessed in its perennial life.

What might it say to the birds who sing and mate on its branches? Or to the bees who suck nectar from its flowers and spread its pollen? Does it get annoyed by the animals who pee on it to mark their territory? Surely it must develop some affection towards the kids who see it as prime real estate for hide and seek? Or towards that couple who secretly had their first kiss under its shade, taking shelter as much from the sun as from the society?

How might it scream and cry when it is cut?

I truly believe that there’s a far greater threat to trees than the rapid infrastructure development: indifference. Once we start to care, we start making deliberate efforts to conserve.

Take the Bishnoi community for example.

The Bishnois are well-known for their cultural values of environmentalism and love for all animals and plants. So much so that in 1730, when the Maharaja of Marwar sent his soldiers to cut down Khejri trees in a village in Rajasthan, over 363 Bishnois, led by the legendary Amrita Devi Bishnoi hugged the trees to stop them from being cut, leading to a massacre by the soldiers. The village was later renamed Khejrali in honour of the innocent people who laid down their lives. This incident was also the inspiration for the Chipko movement in the last century.

This isn’t called caring about nature, no. To lay down your life in service of nature requires a much greater force than just “caring”. This is devotion, love even.

This kind of love comes from hundreds of years of cultural values passed across generations. And this is just one of the many tales of the Bishnois contributing to natural conservation.

I truly believe we can all grab a page from the Bishnoi textbook. We may not need to lay down our lives, we don’t even need to personify trees as I did above. But I believe every single one of us is capable of looking at plants with more wonder and awe.

Wonder leads to appreciation, and appreciation leads to a sense of care.

So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is this: Go to your nearest tree, and observe it. The roughness of its bark, the shape of its leaves, what birds sit on it. And at the risk of looking like a crazy person, talk to it. You won’t get a reply, but I’ll be damned if you don’t feel a sense of serenity.

Until next time.

Be curious, stay kind.