The Giving Tree + the Taking Human
Like all “good” moms, I read books to my children at bedtime including Shel Silverstein’s classic, The Giving Tree. Although something didn’t sit right with me about it (in retrospect it left me sad), I didn’t give it a second thought as I was busy early-morning yoga-ing, packing lunches, and driving to soccer practice. It was only recently when I found Topher Payne’s alternate ending to The Giving Tree that I realized what irked me about the story in the first place.
For those who need a refresher, The Giving Tree is about a boy who befriends a tree and takes him for all he’s worth. First, the boy takes apples, followed by branches, and he continues to take until the tree is reduced to a lowly stump. The boy grows into an unhappy, insatiable, ungrateful man. Topher Payne’s version, entitled The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries, instead tells a story of a tree who says when enough is enough. He rescues his friendship with the boy through the introduction of honesty and empathy, and together they create a mutualistic arrangement that produces the greatest apple pies, prosperity, and joy for generations to come.
From my perspective, our dominant culture operates like the boy in The Giving Tree. Since the Industrial Revolution, we have pillaged the Earth for every natural resource we can gather. At this point, we are living in a period of overshoot; in terms of goods and services we receive from the planet, we’re all living wildly beyond our means. If everyone lived the way we do in America, we would need almost five planet Earth’s to provide the necessary resources.
Our vast exploitation of Earth’s resources is a direct result of the white dominant characteristics embedded in our culture. The native people Indigenous to Turtle Island, where we now reside, live in harmony with nature. They respect other species and their rights to have a home here. They generate an energy of symbiosis. Since we colonized and industrialized, we’ve destroyed over 50% of the world’s forests. We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event and the impetus is human beings. We have stolen and destroyed land that was responsibly stewarded for years without so much as a formal apology.
I’ve been conditioned into white supremacy’s need to hoard power, its values of quantity over quality and dollars over people and am partially responsible for the blatant disrespect to our planet we’ve seen in recent decades. My relationship with the environment mirrors how I have treated other humans, as transactional means to an end. My narcissistic, patriarchal norms inform an “I’ll-get-mine” attitude leaving the future with less viable resources to sustain themselves and the added job of cleaning up environmental messes I created.
From an adjacent perspective, I also realized that I had subconsciously always interpreted the tree as the child’s mother; a mother who gave until she had nothing left. I admit, that’s how I thought I should behave as a mother. More recently, I’ve revisited and examined my relationship to motherhood. What am I teaching my kids? What am I leaving them with? I’ve had to shift my behaviors to match my values; the same values I want to instill in my children. Boundaries had to be created and every member of my family is now held accountable to a higher standard for what they can do and how they can help in their corner of the planet. My love for them is no longer a never-ending cycle of giving, rather it is shifting their awareness to help them see what they have to give to others. Through this process, I’ve aligned with my deepest truth, stepping into who I want to be as an ancestor, and our family unit focuses on being of service to others while each loving ourselves.
The part about The Giving Tree that bothers me the most is how I was OK with the story for such a long time. Something didn’t feel right and I denied my intuition. I tried to make peace with the unhappy old man sitting on a stump at the end. It seemed totally normal for a part of nature to be in relationship with a boy, and ultimately a man, who’s taught he can take whatever he wants and will never be happy. How long have I been OK with pillaging the environment whilst not being happy and thinking I’m entitled to more? I was worried about if I was a good person instead of examining HOW I was in the world and what remains when I am gone. This journey is about growing and changing. It’s about exploring what we think our values are, and what they actually are when they align. It’s about noticing habits and tweaking them one by one until we realize the entirety of our days look different. When I change “how” I do something, what I do changes, and so does my impact.