Deborah sits under a Mother Tree and listens

Perhaps the Prophet Deborah under her tree it isn’t so much about the prophet as it is about the tree.

A Mother Tree is connected to all the other trees in a forest; all the trees are networked in community and she is at their heart. Scholars and foresters have thoroughly demonstrated this with lots of fascinating empirical research. (Read Peter Wohlleben, Suzanne Simard, and Merlin Sheldrake.)

Trees talk to and help one another underground through expansive dedicated networks of mycelium (fungi). Above ground, trees message back and forth with chemicals and pollen and perhaps voiced resonances we cannot directly detect. They share resources, engage in mutual defense, encourage the less well equipped, and promote the collective welfare in emergencies and over the long term.

If a prophet sits under a tree and renders judgment to the people, she would be well advised to be sitting under a Mother Tree and to listen respectfully. I am trying.

Background

Lately, since the advent of Trump 2.0 in the US, we have witnessed a phenomenon there known as “flooding the zone.”

The phrase has been used to describe the initial stages of the game plan for autocracy now being orchestrated by the Trump administration, as blueprinted in the “Project 2025” documents. It calls for launching massive waves of overwhelming brutality through mechanisms of control, disinformation, confusion, and illegal overreach by the administration. The wannabe dictator and his minions promote an immediate and destructive deconstruction of institutions – public, private, and academic; local, state, and national. The more chaos generated, the less able ordinary people are to respond effectively as their rights are restricted and the nation’s wealth is shifted ever more substantially from the poor, working class, and middle class to the rich and uber-rich. Flood the zone! Flood the zone!

This description also fits the actions of the current government of Israel, driven by the favored priorities of Prime Minister Netanyahu (stay in power, stay out of jail, never allow Palestinians to achieve a state of their own) and his Kahanist partners Messrs. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and company (God gave us all this land and it must be cleansed by any means necessary of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem). A great deal has been written about all this and anyone can access it with Google and an internet connection.

The problem, apart from the moral degradation and devolution involved, is that this tsunami of hate, xenophobia, supremacism and othering is unsustainable in the long run. Gandhi said it best: Tyrants always fall. But what can we do in the meantime? Take to the streets, of course; this is our right and our duty, although Trump and Bibi are both counting on our doing so as justification for siccing heavily armed police and/or military forces on angry citizens exercising their right of protest in the public space. Nonetheless, with discipline, peaceful mass protest is possible and probably crucial. But what else? What else can be done?

Here is what the Mother Tree is saying

To help and sustain all of us through these dark times, the Mother Tree under which I sit is telling me this above all: Flood the zone. Flood it with love. When they flood the zone with hate, we must flood the zone with love. Everywhere. All the time. Nonstop.

Hate is a traitorous tool; those who wield it will be brought down by it in the end… but that may take some time, of course. Meanwhile, we will not defeat hate with hate; only love can do that. Not many have preached along those lines; fewer still, in modern times, have fully lived it. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of those few: ​“Returning hate for hate mul­ti­plies hate, adding deep­er dark­ness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness can­not dri­ve out dark­ness; only light can do that. Hate can­not dri­ve out hate; only love can do that.”

You and I, dear reader, can be part of this movement. Individually and collectively. Every which way. On your own and in community. Unconditional love, kindnesses great and small, love your enemy, love thy neighbor as thyself, love the other, fake your power of love until you feel it brimming inside you… Love every child like a mother, every mother like a child. Love every man as an apprentice woman! Love every god worshipped by anyone, anywhere, as an orphan in need of a mother goddess.

My Mother Tree is telling me: Let love emanate from you until you empty out. Inhale love; exhale love. Love green plants with every breath you breathe; they will love you back. Love trees.

Let love be an aura that you move within, always.

Her advice for you is: Find a Mother Tree out there; sit under her and listen. (Better that than doom-scrolling; those screens are full of contagious hate, flooding the zone.)

Let love select the maxims you adopt to remind yourself to love unconditionally. The Mother Tree will encourage us not to spend our energy judging the other side. There is no room for judging the other side when you are trying to flood the zone with love.

Four days after the massacres of October 7th, 2023, the Guardian online published an article by author Naomi Klein entitled “In Gaza and Israel, side with the child over the gun.” (She was at pains to empathize with victims on both sides, and to criticize the global left for rationalizing and even celebrating the October 7th bloodletting.) By October of 2024, meanwhile, Klein was writing with what seemed like horror and regret about how Israel was using its own trauma as a weapon of war: Amidst “the deluge of immersive art being produced to commemorate 7 October, what is not included is Palestine, specifically Gaza. Not the decades of strangled conditions of life on the other side of the wall that led up to the attacks – and not the tens of thousands of Palestinian people, including wrenching numbers of infants and children, whom Israel has killed and maimed since 7 October.” In the interim, the theme from Klein’s 2023 essay has since become a viral meme online: Side with the child over the gun, no matter whose child, no matter whose gun.

The last word

I have a dear friend living at one of the punishing Ground Zero locations of human brutality, in the city of Ramallah in the Palestinian West Bank. Gradually the situation around his home has deteriorated so that violence random or planned by Israeli settlers and military has become nonstop and routine; in Ramallah, it has been years since the atmosphere was anything like normal. And nothing about what is going on now in the West Bank or East Jerusalem is normal. A few days ago, my friend emailed me that an unofficially adopted child of his in Gaza, struggling to survive under unfathomable circumstances, had just messaged him to ask straight out: Are we all going to die? When I had digested that sufficiently, I wrote to say that I was working on an essay about combatting the massive onslaught of hate (whether in the US or in Israel/Palestine) by suggesting that we must flood the zone with love. My friend did not disagree, but shared a heartfelt, uncensored response: “And one must somehow also love oneself when the world collapses on you and strips from you everything called life.”

If only my friend could sit under a Mother Tree in safety and silence for a while and heal, and if only that child could do likewise – but I fear that the next such opportunity for either of them is a long way off. We who feel helpless to change the macro situation must nonetheless do what we are able. It will not be in vain, because there is a great and mysterious balance in the world, which is disturbed at our peril, and each of us has a role to play in restoring it. I can only tell you what I am hearing, clear as a bell, under my tree: Flood the zone with love.