Of Tree Lines and Tolerance

 

We climbed and climbed. Endless “up” it seemed.

Finally, we got to a place with vistas endless. 360 degrees doesn’t quite do it justice.

Christian, my running buddy and a professional trail runner, had brought me to Penitente Peak in the Santa Fe Mountains, 12,200 above sea level.

Our conversation over the first hours of the run had prepared us well for this peak. In fact, we talked about the Islamic tradition that talks about nature’s beauty as the first tier of heaven.

Well, we had arrived in a place that inspired nothing short of otherworldly splendor.

Being an animal not used to such heights, I stared at the bare faces of the mountains at our eye level. Beneath that nakedness, pinons and spruce trees.

I had never climbed high enough to see what the “tree line” really was. I was now here.

I stared for a moment, confused a bit as I saw a clump of trees very much making a wavy line at best. Gone were my notions that the tree line would bring me back to high school geometry, a straight line connecting two points. Gone was my conceptualization of a belt that the mountain would wear around its waist, somewhere around 11,000 feet high.

    

I think Christian saw my look of surprise as I squinted to make sure I was seeing it all correctly.

“What was the tree line’s teaching for me?” I thought as we began our descent.

My mind, and I assume most of ours, wants to see this world in a very straight-line way. Trees either grow or they don’t, with a nice geometry-teacher-approved-line separating the two realities.

Tolerance requires us to see the trees for how they actually are, even if it jars us from a cemented belief not based in reality. Much more messy, akin to a 4 year old with a paintbrush in her hand as opposed to a ruler-drawn line.

Tolerance is a mindset that appreciates and looks for the nuances that make people who they are, seeking to understand their perspective, affirming their humanity and their right to think and behave differently.

It is a heartset that assumes commonality despite outward differences toward things we care about passionately like climate change, racism, or our best choice for president of the country. That commonality becomes the basis for tolerance, listening, and being open to change ourselves.

I did some reading on tree lines. Yes, they can be well-defined, but they are often a gradual transition. Trees grow shorter and more sparsely before gradually decreasing to an area with no trees. And depending on how the sun hits and where the water runs, the tree line likely differs in altitude even within a single mountain. There can even be a double tree line, with bristlecone pine trees growing far above the tree line for pinon and juniper trees on the same face of the same mountain. Add in the effects of latitude and you see that a tree line ranges from 0 ft elevation in areas of Northern Quebec to 17,000 ft in the Andes of Bolivia.

Tree lines are much more dynamic and wavy and unpredictable than we thought, huh?

I am thankful for this first glimpse of a tree line, thankful Christian brought me to such heights.  In seeing it with my own eyes, I find a place for tolerance to replace a rigid notion of what is that I had carried into that run.

Maybe we just came up with a corollary (remember those from geometry??) about seeing the forest for the trees.

It is seeing the tree line for what it is – not a line at all.

It is seeing each other as clumps and groves with our unique way of being, beautiful growths within a 4-year old’s painting, more human and more unified than our politics or media leads us to think.