Widening Kin

Becoming available to the more-than-human world

Two enormous coast live oaks stand on either side of my house, just beyond the property line. They were already enormous when the house was built more than 120 years ago. One has been carefully pruned, as though it attended prep school. The other was clearly homeschooled. It’s wilder, bushier, more unruly. Crows and squirrels move through its branches. It seems to have plenty going on without any assistance from me. That’s the one that has captured my attention.

I often sit outside and simply look at it. But over the past year, I’ve begun approaching it differently, with the intention of becoming more available to its presence, its Being, its spirit, whatever words might point toward what I’m trying to encounter. And something extraordinary has happened.

At times, I’ve experienced such enormous waves of love in its presence that I’ve barely been able to receive them. I’ve had to go slowly. There’s a strong sense that the tree is available for connection, that perhaps it’s been waiting for me to notice. I have the feeling that it receives my appreciation and admiration.

Do I know what the oak is experiencing? Of course not. But I know that something in our relationship has changed. And I find myself wondering how much of the living world I’ve been walking past without really meeting.

From scenery to relationship

I’ve loved trees, gardens, animals, wild places, and the beauty of the natural world for as long as I can remember. But loving nature isn’t necessarily the same as being in relationship with the particular beings around us. It’s possible to admire a tree while still experiencing it as part of the scenery. To care deeply about the environment while imagining humans standing outside it, responsible for protecting or managing it.

Most of us have inherited ways of seeing that divide the world into human subjects and everything else: resources, property, ecosystems, objects of study, things to enjoy or conserve. Even our well-intentioned language can maintain that separation.

I’m curious about what happens when we begin to loosen it. What if the oak isn’t simply something I appreciate? What if I approach it as another presence in a world full of lives I don’t fully understand? Not because I can know what it’s thinking or feeling. Not because I want to turn it into a human in tree form. But because, maybe relationship can begin before understanding.

An awkward beginner

I think of myself as an awkward beginner animist. I’m experimenting. I talk and sing to the plants in my garden. I offer little blessings to seeds as I tuck them into the soil. I try to ask permission before pruning, though I confess I’m not always very good at noticing a no. I’ve also been exploring seasonal rituals and the rhythms of the moon. These practices change my experience of time. They help me feel less like a person moving through a schedule and more like a body participating in the rhythms of a living Earth.

I don’t claim expertise in communicating with plants or trees. I’m not interested in collecting mystical experiences. I’m interested in what changes when I approach the world with more attention, affection, curiosity, and humility. When I stop assuming that only humans have something to say. And when I allow myself to be affected by beings whose lives are so different from mine.

What does relationship ask?

Of course, Widening Kin can’t stop at the pleasure of feeling connected. If the living world is more than a beautiful backdrop for human life, then these relationships may ask something of us. Maybe more attention. More restraint. A willingness to protect a place, change a habit, repair harm, or notice whose lives are affected by our choices.

Maybe the first offering is just to stop treating the world as if it exists for us. And maybe reciprocity isn’t a matter of balancing the books. It’s learning to respond. The oak has given me an experience of love I can barely describe. What might it mean to love it back? I don’t know yet. But the question changes how I sit with it. How I notice the crows and squirrels who make their lives in its branches. How I think about the land, the water it needs, and the generations of life it has sheltered. The relationship starts to widen.

An invitation to widen the circle

Widening Kin is one of the emerging practice fields of Humaning, an exploration of becoming more available to life. Here, the inquiry extends beyond human relationships to the land, waters, plants, animals, ancestors, future generations, and the countless lives in which our human existence is entangled.

Not all these relationships are the same. They don’t all ask the same things of us. And we don’t need to pretend to understand them in order to begin paying attention. I’m curious what becomes possible when we approach the larger living world less as something to manage or as a backdrop for our important lives, and more as kin we can get to know deeply.

What might we receive that we’ve never noticed before? What might we discover about our place in the living world? And what might these relationships ask of us in return?

I don’t have a technique for making the ferns and frogs speak English. I’m learning to listen, to participate, to be surprised, and to respond. Sometimes that means making an offering, changing a habit, or caring for a place. And sometimes it means sitting quietly outside, overwhelmed by love for a very old tree, wondering how long it’s been there, being itself, while I was busy being human.