An exquisite, lovingly crafted meditation on plants, trees, and our place in the natural world, in the tradition of Robin Wall Kimmerers Braiding Sweetgrass and Annie Dillards Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Sumana Roy has writtengrowna radiant and wondrous book.Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot Beautiful. . . . Roy weaves together science, nature, personal narrative, literature, sociology, and more to keep the reader turning pagesand to turn us all into tree-lovers.Kateri Kramer, The Rumpus I was tired of speed. I wanted to live to tree time. So writes Sumana Roy at the start of How I Became a Tree, her captivating, adventurous, and self-reflective vision of what it means to be human in the natural world. Drawn to trees wisdom, their nonviolent way of being, their ability to cope with loneliness and pain, Roy movingly explores the lessons that writers, painters, photographers, scientists, and spiritual figures have gleaned through their engagement with treesfrom Rabindranath Tagore to Tomas Tranströmer, Ovid to Octavio Paz, William Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood. Her stunning meditations on forests, plant life, time, self, and the exhaustion of being human evoke the spacious, relaxed rhythms of the trees themselves. Hailed upon its original publication in India as a love song to plants and trees and an ode to all that is unnoticed, ill, neglected, and yet resilient, How I Became a Tree blends literary history, theology, philosophy, botany, and more, and ultimately prompts readers to slow down and to imagine a reenchanted world in which humans live more like trees.
