Most life stories are told chronologically: a person was born in year X, spent Y years working at something, had their breakthrough in year Z etc. The standard biographical model might as well be a PowerPoint slide of sequential boxes laddering neatly toward a goal. And it is such an ingrained way of telling life stories, whether you're reading about a historical figure or having an introductory conversation with someone, that you might think it is the story of life itself.
But it’s not. At least, not in the more-than-human world.
The story of life in nature runs in circles and cycles, seasons and spirals. Rather than a one-dimensional, one-way, beginning-middle-end, it’s around and around and upside down, a dance floor folded into a Möbius loop where the music never stops playing. (At least, that's how I like to think of especially exuberant places in nature, like rainforests and coral reefs.)
This essential circularity and continuity of life in nature is something I have to remind myself of, especially when I get too pulled into living by the clock and calendar.
Last summer, when I taught a series of nature workshops, one of the exercises I used was “My life as a tree,” i.e. mapping your autobiography in tree rings. If you'd like to try it for yourself, the instructions go like this:
Spend some time looking at a tree ring pattern (you can use the image above, or try an image search on the term "dendochronology").
Notice the overall continuity of the lines as well as what interrupts or impacts them (if you've been out of school for a while, here's a quick refresher on causes and effects).
Apply this mental model to your own life story. Reflect on your own droughts and mast seasons, pollinating visitors or insect invaders, gentle breezes as well as lightning strikes.
Now draw those lines for each year of your life.
If you do the exercise as described above, with all of your life lines, it will take a while and you might even get bored, but that is part of the discovery.
For myself, I found there was something about tracing the circles around the page that approximated a real-time recap of life lived moment by moment. It showed me I have had relatively long periods of stability and spells of staying in one place, even though I tend to tell my own life story through my hops from one destination to the next. Equally important, the years where I stayed in one place were also times when I experienced growth and inner change.
If you do try this exercise, let me know in the comments what you discovered about your life as a tree!