Trees grant us some of the richest metaphors for our own lives — a polished lens on the quality of attention we pay the world. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” wrote William Blake. Walt Whitman considered them our greatest teachers in living with authenticity. For Hermann Hesse, the key to existential joy was in learning how to listen to the trees.
But far beyond the realm of human-wrested metaphor, trees are sovereign marvels of nature, dazzling in the native poetics of their biological and ecological reality. Their photosynthesis is nature’s way of making life from light. Chlorophyll — which shares a chemical kinship with the hemoglobin in our blood — allows a tree to capture photons, extracting a portion of their energy to make the sugars that make it a tree — the raw material for leaves and bark and roots and branches — then releasing the photons at lower wavelengths back into the atmosphere. A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air — an enormous eye tuned to the light of the universe.
Trees hungrily absorb red light — the longer wavelengths of the visible spectrum — but the neighboring infrared passes straight through them. Under the canopy, where fierce competition for these wavelengths rages, red light is depleted and infrared dominates. Even though trees cannot absorb infrared, they, unlike humans, can “see” it with chemical photoreceptors called phytochromes. The ratio between the two types of light tells trees how much to grow and in which direction, with phytochromes acting as on-off switches for growth. An abundance of red light under uncrowded skies turns the switch on, signaling to the tree to spread its branches wide into any gaps in the canopy; in the crowded shade where infrared dominates, the switch turns off, reducing the growth of side branches and prompting the tree to grow straight up, reaching for the open sky above.
Ever/After by Maria Popova. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
As summer recedes into autumn, cooling the air and dimming the light, the alchemy of transmuting light into growth becomes too metabolically costly for deciduous trees. Chlorophyll begins to break down, revealing the other pigments that had been there all along — the yellow of xanthophyll, the orange of carotenoids, the reds and purples of anthocyanins, turning the canopy into an aria of color.
Meanwhile, the layer of cells by which the stem holds on to the branch is fraying. Leaves begin to let go — a process known as abscission.
But as they denude the branches, they reveal the subtle nubs of the new buds that had been forming all summer, readying next spring’s growth.
Skeletal and pulmonary, winter trees rise into the leaden sky, their skin a braille poem of resilience.
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.
Climbing the Andes one windy January afternoon, watching peak after peek emerge on the horizon like giant mounds of moss, I found myself wondering about the clear line toward the top where the green ends and the reddish-brown of the barren rock begins, wondering how the trees and shrubs know when to stop, how far to keep pushing, where the point is past which the conditions become too inhospitable for growth, for flourishing, for survival.
This may be the hardest equation to balance in all of existence: when to keep trying and when to stop. Nowhere is it more confounding, because nowhere is the calculus of reason more haunted by emotion, than in our intimate relationships. There, all the variables are too charged with feeling to be weighed accurately; there, the most vulnerable part of the ego keeps factoring itself into the arithmetic. Because time is something we can measure and tenderness is not, we keep trying to ward off the singular sense of personal failure that the loss of love can bring by measuring the success of a relationship by quantity of time rather than quality of being, only to find ourselves on barren rock.
Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922–April 11, 2007) was twenty-two and just home from his wartime duty in Europe, where he had been held as a prisoner of war in Dresden and barely survived the Allied bombing of the city, when he married his college classmate Jane Marie Cox — two young people not yet having become themselves, unformed and unhealed, trying to be together.
They loved each other, but as they grew up, they grew apart, grew askance. And yet, dragged by the momentum of culture, they had a son, then a daughter, then another as Vonnegut struggled to make a living as a writer.
Vonnegut at 33 with his family.
When his sister died of cancer two days after her husband was killed in a train accident, he adopted their three young sons. In that way life has of denying us any alternative experimental condition but our lived experience, no one knows what might have become of the couple in an experimental design other than a small house pattered by six hungry children. They fought more and more, until even the most mundane conversation couldn’t but become an argument.
Vonnegut tried to take refuge in writing, but his twin peaks of bills and rejection slips came to tower over his dream. Middle-aged and penniless, he was about to give up when he received an unexpected offer to teach at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, procured through the kindness of a single reader touched by the work of this obscure unhappy writer. It was a lifeline both professional and personal. Vonnegut packed his bags and headed to Iowa, knowing in his heart, though he was not yet ready to allow the thought, that this was the end of his life with Jane.
Two years into teaching, as his writing was finally beginning to receive recognition, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and used the prize money to travel back to Dresden, only to find much of the city still in ruins. I wonder if he thought about love then, how it too is a world that can be left in ruins beyond repair if the warfare is too brutal or too long.
Suddenly catapulted into public success — after five novels and countless short stories, Vonnegut was lauded as an overnight success with Slaughterhouse-Five — he remained lodged in the pit of personal failure. He and Jane had been together for a quarter century, happy for only a fraction of it. Torn between his emotional inability to hold on to the relationship and his cerebral unwillingness to give up, he began drowning his discontent in drink.
In the last year of his forties, he moved out and headed for New York, but couldn’t bring himself to end the marriage. Taking solace in Margaret Mead’s assurance that “a couple which has had children has an irreversible and undissolvable relationship,” he wrote to Jane:
We hurt each other back and forth so much, almost absent-mindedly, that it was common sense for us to separate, if only to break the rhythm.
He shaded in this stark contour in a letter to a friend, painting a haunting portrait of a dead relationship:
I myself am living alone in two rooms and a garden in New York, attempting to draw useful electricity from the millions of milling strangers around me. I am no longer living with Jane for this reason, as nearly as I can tell: We are no longer capable of conducting amiable conversations. When we try to talk, to amuse each other and pass the time, our words are wooden, stilted, queer, distant, and — finally — quietly bitter. That is too bad, and many people regard me as heartless for leaving her. But the hours and days and years dragged so. I am happier now, though far from hilarious and proud. I have achieved a sort of Limbo, which is a distinct improvement over what I had before. I am beginning to write again. That had stopped for a while. I do not wish to marry again. I’m not in love with anybody else.
Kurt Vonnegut at 50.
Writing remained his one oasis of sanity amid the limbo of his Middle Passage. Some part of him — that wise part that lives in each of us, whispering what we don’t want to but need to hear — knew that he had to reimagine his life if he were not to squander it. But he was not ready. So he reimagined his writing, taking the skeleton of a play he had written fifteen years earlier and enfleshing it anew. Happy Birthday, Wanda June ran for five months to mixed reviews, but the world was finally paying attention.
Having documented Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic speech during the March on Washington and worked as a war photographer in Vietnam, Jill Krementz was unperturbed by the cantankerous writer whose process she was hired to capture for a magazine profile. She immediately felt both Vonnegut’s brilliance and his brokenness, felt the sharp edge on which his own heart was breaking, saw to the roiling core of his wounded tenderness. He immediately decided he didn’t like her. (“There is no terror like that of being known,” Emerson shuddered at the discomposing intimacy that bloomed between him and Margaret Fuller.)
Within months, they were living together.
Just before he moved in with Jill, Vonnegut wrote to his seventeen-year-old daughter Nanette:
Dear old Nanny —
You certainly deserve a letter from me. A hundred letters would be more like it, I love you so.
I will be home from time to time to see you. But I will not stay for long. I still love your mother, but we can’t be together much without fighting. We have tried to do things about this, but nothing helps, and each fight hurts more than the last one.
I wasn’t stolen away by another woman. I don’t think people can steal other people. I simply went away because the fighting was making everybody so unhappy. I’ve done that several times before. Going to Iowa was an example. Every time I went away I simply went to aloneness. There was never any other woman beckoning me to come.
This time, for instance, I couldn’t make myself come home after the play opened, and I was alone. I hardly knew Jill at all, and I didn’t like her much, and whatever happened between us happened long after I’d decided home was too uncomfortable for me.
Eighteen years his junior but in many ways his spiritual elder, Jill enveloped him in a kindness so entirely new he didn’t know what to do with it, a love he hadn’t thought possible. He tried to fight with her, out of reflex, but she simply loved him, and so he slowly unbraced the oppositional stance that had become his default, slowly stopped self-medicating. He grew healthy, grew happy, grew himself.
Still, it took him six years to meet the emotional truth of his failed marriage with the hard fact of divorce. When he finally decided to do it, he wrote to Nan:
As for the divorce: I will always love your mother, as must have been evident on Sunday. But we could never live together again. Our conversations go so badly. Also: I want to be fair to Jill, who saved me from knocking myself off or turning into an alcoholic. I will not marry Jill, but I will stop asking that she live with a married man. And Jane, who is fond of marriage, should have the chance to marry again. I am not pursuing happiness through divorce. I am permanently damaged by the break-up of marriage. Those wounds will never heal. I am simply trying to make the best of an unpleasant situation. Let me say again, too, that Jill did not break the marriage. It was broken long before that — about the time I went to Iowa. There was no other woman beckoning me to Iowa. Later on, there was no woman beckoning me to New York City. I arrived both places in total solitude, and feeling simply awful.
There will be no acrimonious argle-bargle about divorce this time. We will not make the mistake of hiring two strangers to fight each other on our behalf. Jane and I will arrive at some sort of division of property, and some scheme for my sending her money regularly. She already owns the Cape house and some stocks and a large savings account in cash. I will add to that treasure, so she won’t have much to worry about as long as I’m popular and productive. Then Don Farber will draw up a simple agreement, and that will be that. The legal steps will be brief formalities, without any arguments to be made before a judge.
It took him another two years to formalize his relationship with Jill. By the time they decided to marry, he was fifty-seven and one of the most beloved authors in America. His daughter was the first person he told:
Dearest Nanny —
I want you to be the first person in our family to find this out: That Jill and I have decided to marry each other in November, probably a couple of days after Thanksgiving. Jill will then be three months shy of being forty, and we will have lived together about nine years. The first years of the relationship were tempestuous. Much of the tempest was my fault, surely. I was in a frenzied state of mourning and dismay over the failure of my once good marriage to Jane. Jill had nothing to do with that failure, but she was handy to blame. Be that as it may, Jill and I behave most affectionately and reasonably toward each other now, and unselfishly. We are in love. Our heads are clear. We are working and playing most cheerfully.
I do not endorse serial marriage for anyone. I myself have always wished to be as monogamous as a swan. I was monogamous with your mother until the very end, and will be so with Jill.
After a rough sketch of the wedding (“It will be very private. We don’t want our pictures in the paper.”), he added:
I sympathize fully with the mixed loyalties you and all the rest of my children would feel on such an occasion. So I of course invite you all, and hope you all will come. If the ceremony and party are going to cause you pain, you should not subject yourself to that pain. Your coming or staying away will not be a vote for or against anything.
Mostly, dear Nanny, I want you to know how happy I am just now, and that I have every reason to look forward to some very good years ahead.
Kurt Vonnegut and Jill Krementz a decade into their love. (Photograph: Adam Scull.)
Kurt and Jill remained together until his death, thirty-six years after they met. It was there, in the safety and sweetness of their love, that he discovered the simple secret of happiness.
This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine.
“Who are you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?”
Before he was Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, Charles Dodgson was a logician. His Wonderland is a series of nested thought experiments about change and the limits of logic. When the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom would make her smaller and the other taller, Alice is stupefied by how something perfectly round can have sides, how a single thing can produce such opposite effects. And yet inside this fictional parable about the nature of the self is a biological reality about the nature of fungi — organisms that operate according to a different logic. They belong to a single kingdom, yet they are endowed with polar powers: the lion’s mane mushroom that can sharpen a mind and the honey fungus that can slay a tree; the cordyceps that can drive an ant to suicide and the psilocybin that can drive you to delirium; the Penicillium that has saved millions of lives and the Puccinia graminis that has blighted nations into deadly famines, changing the census of the world.
I grew up with Alice, and I grew up with mushrooms. Around the time I discovered Wonderland, my mother — my complicated mother oscillating between the poles of the mind — discovered foraging. Each weekend we would head into the forests of Bulgaria and spend long hours searching — for mushrooms, yes, but also for a common language between our two island universes. I delighted in the unbidden flame of a chanterelle on a bed of moss, in the shy bloom of a shaggy parasol between the pines, and, once, in finding a king bolete bigger than my awestruck face. Here was a world that was wilder yet safer than my own, resinous with wonder. I was captivated by the notion that edible species could have poisonous doubles, by the way the brain forms a search image that trains the eye on the inconspicuous domes. Mushrooms were helping me learn so much of what life was already teaching me — that a thing can look like something you love but turn dangerous, even deadly; that the more you expect something, the more of it you find.
An organism, of course, is not a parable or a metaphor. An organism is a cathedral of complexity, both sovereign and interdependent. Although mushrooms have populated our myths and our medicine for millennia, they were only factored into our model of the living world less than a century ago. When Linnaeus devised his landmark classification system, he divided nature into three kingdoms: two living (plants and animals) and one nonliving (minerals). The scientists of his generation gave fungi no special attention, brushing them under the conceptual carpet of plants. Darwin ignored them altogether, even though we now know that fungi are the fulcrum by which evolution lifted life out of the ocean and onto the land — they greened the earth, helping aquatic plants adapt to terrestrial life by anchoring their primitive roots, not yet capable of acquiring nutrients on their own, in a mycorrhizal substrate of symbiosis.
Perhaps, then, it is not accidental that a marine biologist — Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology the year Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland entered the world — proposed Protista as a new kingdom of life for primitive life-forms that are neither plants nor animals; after some hesitation, he moved fungi into it. But it would be another century before, just after my mother was born, the American plant ecologist Robert Whittaker gave fungi their own kingdom of life.
Among the hundreds of thousands of species now known, and probably millions not yet named, there are ones that crumble at the lightest touch and ones that can survive the assault of cosmic radiation in outer space. On the western edge of North America thrives a fungal colony older than calculus, older than Jesus, older than the wheel. In the mountains of East Asia blooms a bright blue mushroom that bleeds indigo. A bioluminescent agaric lights up the forests of Brazil and the islands of Japan. Across tropical Taiwan grows a pale blue mushroom whose button is smaller than a millimeter. In the old-growth forests of Oregon dwells an individual fungus spanning eighteen hundred football fields — Earth’s largest living organism.
Without fungi, we would never know Earth’s most beautiful flowers — orchid seeds have no energy reserve of their own and can only obtain their carbon through a fungal symbiont — or Earth’s most alien: white as bone, the ghost pipe (Monotropa uniflora) lacks the chlorophyll by which other plants capture photons to alchemize sunlight into sugar for life. Emily Dickinson considered the ghost pipe “the preferred flower of life.” A painting of it graced the cover of her posthumously published poems. She was not wrong to think it “almost supernatural,” for it subverts the ordinary laws of nature: rather than reaching up for sunlight like green plants, the ghost pipe reaches down so that its cystidia — the fine hairs coating its roots — can entwine around the branching filaments of underground fungi, known as hyphae, sapping nutrients the fungus has drawn from the roots of nearby photosynthetic trees.
These mycorrhizal relationships permeate every ecosystem, making fungi the enchanted subterranean loom on which the fabric of nature is woven. Perhaps this is why it was so hard for so long to classify them separately from other life-forms. Perhaps we never should have done so. Perhaps it was a mistake to segregate them into a separate kingdom, or to have kingdoms at all, as nonsensical as dividing a planet veined with rivers and spined with mountains into countries bounded by borders that cut across ecosystems with the blade of warring nationalisms. Beneath every battlefield in the history of the world a mycelial wonderland has continued to thrive, continued to turn death into life so that ghost pipes and orchids may rise from where the bodies fell. Fungi made Earth what it is and they will inherit it. They are not a kingdom of life — life is their kingdom.
Almost exactly one year before Charles Dodgson dreamed up Wonderland to amuse ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters while boating from Oxford to Godstow, a letter by someone who signed himself Cellarius was printed in a New Zealand newspaper under the heading “Darwin Among the Machines.” It would later be revealed as the work of twenty-seven-year-old English writer Samuel Butler. Epochs before the first modern computer and the golden age of algorithms, before we came to call the confluence of the two “artificial intelligence,” Butler prophesied the birth of a new “mechanical kingdom” of our own creation, which would take on a life of its own alongside the kingdoms of nature. “In these last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race,” he wrote. “We are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation… daily giving them greater power… self-acting power.” With an eye to the evolution of consciousness, he asked: “Why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?” More than a century and a half before our modern worries about artificial intelligence, Butler worried that this new kingdom of life would be parasitic upon us. He worried that although the human mind has been “moulded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years,” the mechanical kingdom evolved in a blink of evolutionary time. “No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward,” he cautioned. “Our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches.”
Perhaps we are on the brink of living Butler’s prophecy because we modeled our machines on the wrong kingdom, modeled their intelligence on our own, only to find that they are as parasitic and predatory as we are, as they parasitize and prey upon us. What if the correct model was always there, hidden beneath our bipedal overconfidence — all this time we have been building and walking and warring over Earth’s original networked intelligence, this planetary übermind transmitting the signal of life via the hypertextual protocols of hyphae, through the mesh topology of mycelium. What if our worship of binary logic is what warped Wonderland? Who would we be if our “artificial” intelligence turned natural, built on the nonbinary logic of symbiosis, restoring the unity of life into a perfect circle with no sides to take?
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Georgia O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887–March 6, 1986), celebrated as America’s first great female artist, was a woman of strong opinions on art, life, and setting priorities and an uncommon gift for committing to words what she committed to canvas. But some of her most revelatory insights on art and the creative experience were shared in a series of letters to writer Sherwood Anderson, who had befriended legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz — O’Keeffe’s husband and her correspondent in volumes of passionate love letters. Encountering O’Keeffe’s art in the early 1920s had inspired Anderson to pick up the paintbrush for the first time and begin painting himself. Meanwhile, the two developed an epistolary fellowship around their shared ideas about art and their amicable intellectual disagreements. (Only three years later, Anderson would come to articulate his own unforgettable wisdom on art in a letter to his son, very likely influenced by O’Keeffe and their creative rapport.)
Found in Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters (public library) — an altogether unputdownable out-of-print volume released in 1987, a year after O’Keeffe’s death, to mark her centennial — the letters stand as a sublime paean to the kind of creative integrity that rises above public opinion and blazes with crystalline clarity of conviction. At the same time, one can’t help but wonder how O’Keeffe’s art — how her sanity — might have suffered had she lived in our present era of perpetual sprinting on the social-media hamster wheel of public opinion.
Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz, 1918
On August 1, 1923, she writes to Anderson:
This morning I saw an envelope on the table Stieglitz addressed to you — I’ve wanted so often to write you — two things in particular to tell you — but I do not write — I do not write to anyone — maybe I do not like telling myself to people — and writing means that.
First I wanted to tell you — way back in the winter that I liked your “Many Marriages” — and that what others have said about it amused me much — I realize when I hear others speak of it that I do not seem to read the way they do — I seem to — like — or discard — for no particular reason excepting that it is inevitable at the moment. — At the time I read it I saw no particular reason why I should write you that I liked it — because I do not consider my liking — or disliking of any particular consequence to anyone but myself — And knowing you were trying to work I felt that opinions on what was past for you would probably be like just so much rubbish — in your way for the clear thing ahead — And when I think of you — I think of you rather often — it is always with the wish — a real wish — that the work is going well — that nothing interferes —
I think of you often because the few times you came to us were fine — like fine days in the mountains — fine to remember — clear sparkling and lots of air — fine air.
After a characteristically evocative note about Stieglitz’s health that spring had rendered him “just a little heap of misery — sleepless — with eyes — ears — nose — arm — feet — ankles — intestines — all taking their turn at deviling him,” O’Keeffe expresses deep gratitude for the very thing that led Virginia Woolf to term letter writing “the humane art” — the soul-salving power of a letter sent by one human being to another:
You can see why I appreciated your letters — maybe more than he did — because of what they gave him — I don’t remember now what you wrote — I only remember that they made me feel that you feel something of what I know he is — that it means much to you in your life — adds much to your life — and a real love for him seemed to have grown from it
And in his misery he was very sad — and I guess I had grown pretty sad and forlorn feeling too — so your voice was kind to hear out of faraway and I want to tell you that it meant much — Thanks
Aware of misfortune’s one-way mirror of hindsight, she adds, “I can only write you this now because things are better.”
Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow, 1923 (Georgia O’Keeffe Museum)
O’Keeffe and Anderson continue their correspondence and in another letter sent a month later, she defies her self-professed distaste for “telling [herself] to people” and instead divulging — with the exhilarating intensity of expression that both her art and her letters to loved ones emanate — a magnificent glimpse of her inner life and creative spirit. She considers the role of form in art and the experience from which art stems:
I feel that a real living form is the result of the individual’s effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown — where it has experienced something — felt something — it has not understood — and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown — known. By unknown — I mean the thing that means so much to the person that wants to put it down — clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand — sometimes he partially knows why — sometimes he doesn’t — sometimes it is all working in the dark — but a working that must be done — Making the unknown — known — in terms of one’s medium is all-absorbing — if you stop to think of the form — as form you are lost — The artist’s form must be inevitable — You mustn’t even think you won’t succeed — Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant — there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing — and keeping the unknown always beyond you — catching crystallizing your simpler clearer version of life — only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead — that you must always keep working to grasp — the form must take care of its self if you can keep your vision clear.
In a remark of extraordinary humility and wisdom, especially in the hindsight of both O’Keeffe’s present status in the canon of art and Anderson’s in that of literature, she considers the feebleness of any present metric of success against a creator’s ultimate significance for posterity:
You and I don’t know whether our vision is clear in relation to our time or not — No matter what failure or success we may have — we will not know — But we can keep our integrity — according to our own sense of balance with the world and that creates our form —
What others have called form has nothing to do with our form — I want to create my own and I can’t do anything else — if I stop to think of what others — authorities or the public — or anyone — would say of my form I’d not be able to do anything.
I can never show what I am working on without being stopped — whether it is liked or disliked I am affected in the same way — sort of paralyzed — .
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Trees grant us some of the richest metaphors for our own lives — a polished lens on the quality of attention we pay the world. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” wrote William Blake. Walt Whitman considered them our greatest teachers in living with authenticity. For Hermann Hesse, the key to existential joy was in learning how to listen to the trees.
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