When it comes to healing, copy the trees

I realised then that the body is like an ecosystem. Our veins and arteries, like rivers, need to flow naturally. A dam or a blockage creates problems, and sometimes, in the way that dams break, debris can get lodged downstream, in organs and places they have no business to be in. Our body has connections in the way a healthy ecosystem does—what affects one part affects the whole thing.

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As I reluctantly turned myself over to hospital, the air grew warmer, and flowers threatened to take over the world as they do only once a year in spring. I noted that my favourite tree, the semal, had buds. In the parks of Delhi, the colourful import of tulips was poking out its first leaves. But the outside world had to wait, as I was wheeled into the intense interiority of the surgery. A painful but relatively minor procedure followed. At the same time, my father was fitted with a pacemaker. I had something removed from my body, and he had something put in. Henceforth, the complex business of living life would be accomplished with these plusses and minuses.

“I had a novice’s hunger for history, but a novice’s inability to envision it," writes Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee, on tackling disease and its history in his fine book, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010). For both the patient and doctor, illnesses can be confounding. When sick, we realise that the body is not just a machine that needs the fuel of food or the oiling of exercise. It isn’t a device with input and output; it is instead a wild creature that recovers through a combination of sensation, emotion and nourishment. It may ask for sunshine in the night, and soup when it’s time to eat solids. It has its own obstinacy; it uses its own set of odd knives and idiosyncratic forks to tackle the main course of life.

As I lay in recovery, trees outside the hospital windows became a diversion. There was an arjuna and a semal tree outside. A black kite settled on the semal. Mynas and bulbuls came to the arjuna. Here was my first lesson: The birds were terrific to see because their business was so different from mine. They were unconcerned by the surgeries and vascular motions of the hospital itself; their preoccupations were refreshing because they seemed so removed from ours.

The world hummed around me while I could not move; I waited for the inside of me to also stop humming with pain. At the same time, the black kite circled again and again, looking for food. The mynas disappeared in a blur. And even though the birds were feathered, and flying, and so far from operating theatres, their business suddenly seemed close to my own: We were each trying to survive. Here was the second lesson then—we were bound together, in the way that we wanted to live as well as we could in the lives given to us. Years ago, Mary Oliver wrote a haunting poem on wild geese flying above—Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Oliver’s “family of things" suggests we can feel a kinship with nature by observing it. Scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer goes a step ahead, suggesting an active engagement with nature. Her book, Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (2024), opens with her eating serviceberries alongside wild birds. She carries a pail for the fruit, and the birds have the “buckets" of their bellies; she writes of the deep gratitude and sense of reciprocity she feels in that moment.

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As the birds cawed and clawed in books and in the skies outside, I was thinking about pain—it was impossible not to think of it, because it threatened to drown me in a single big gulp. It made me out-of-sorts, unmoored and floating in some private dimension. It was hard to tell what was physical and what was mental, or whether both combined to create a special discomfort. (It isn’t just people that get physically affected by their perceptions. Animals do too. In The Search for India’s Rarest Birds (2024), author Aasheesh Pittie writes of the isolation of the Pink-headed duck, a rare Indian bird which was taken to the London zoo for breeding. In the temperate climate, the birds had “fading carnation heads"; they never bred. Eventually, the experiment failed, and the duck became extinct both in the forests of India and the zoo of Britain.)

As pain overwhelmed me, I wondered: Does pain have to be misery? No, I told myself.

Here was my third lesson: I could stave off misery because there were trees and wild spaces waiting outside for my attention and participation. Like a favourite sourdough starter kept alive for decades, being outdoors is a joy the body remembers for a similar length of time. You might feel the giddy rush of childhood while walking barefoot in grass; even a thorn amidst that grass is likely to be laughed off. Getting bathed in phytoncides, which build plant immunity, also fortifies our own resistance. I also find that the more scarred, bruised or burnt I get in the outdoors, the stronger my sense of humour grows. We find ourself cut to size while walking, because nature carries on without us; equally, walkers feel a deep intimacy with nature. It is this combination of detachment and involvement that makes nature, birds and trees so interesting. It’s like loving someone who likes you (but not as much as you love them).

As I walked, slowly, out of the hospital, the sunshine had the promise, and menace, of summer. The first semal flowers had blossomed. The first tulips had broken through the soil. A day later, my friend chastised me for not taking it easy. The body needs rest to recover, he insisted. Here was the final lesson then. Trees grow slowly, in an almost leisurely fashion. And our bodies are like ecosystems; for their restoration, one has to look at the clock of tree-time, rather than at digital watches and pedometers.

In some matters, one should copy the trees: Because really, it isn’t love if there’s no imitation.

Neha Sinha is a conservation biologist and author of Wild and Wilful: Tales of 15 Iconic Indian Species. Views expressed are personal.

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