Sometimes, Home Has Roots ...
- Nishamoni kalita
There are people who look at a tree and see timber.
There are people who see shade, fruit, or a patch of green breaking the monotony of concrete.
And then there are people like me. Whenever I look at a tree, I feel something I have never been able to explain completely. I feel at home.
It is a strange feeling—to find comfort in something that has never spoken my language, never known my name, and never asked anything of me. Yet, every time I stand beneath a tree, I feel a little less alone. The noise inside my mind softens. My breathing slows. Somehow, the world feels gentler.
I often find myself wondering about the life of the tree standing before me. How many monsoons has it witnessed? How many birds have nested in its branches? How many children once played beneath its shade, who are now grandparents? How many storms tried to break it?
And still, it stands. There is something profoundly reassuring about that kind of resilience.
Growing up in Assam, I have always been surrounded by Nature. The mighty Brahmaputra, forests stretching farther than the eyes can see, birdsongs before sunrise, and the scent of wet earth after rain—these are not merely landscapes. They are woven into the way we experience home.
Yet familiarity has a strange way of making us forget the extraordinary. We pass trees every day without wondering how many lives they quietly sustain.
Only recently have I begun to understand what a forest truly is.
Through my internship with Nature’s Beckon, forests became more than collections of trees. I began to see them as intricate living systems—where roots, fungi, microbes, insects, birds, and countless other organisms are connected in ways we are still learning to understand.
An old tree is not simply old. It can be a living archive. ts trunk holds years of growth. Its branches provide shelter. Its flowers and fruits feed animals. Its hollows become homes. Its roots interact with the soil beneath our feet. Mosses, lichens, orchids, insects, birds, and microorganisms may all depend on the spaces it creates.
A forest is not silent. It is speaking all the time. The rustling leaves. The calls of hornbills echoing through the canopy. The movement of insects beneath fallen leaves. The rain tapping against branches. The unseen activity beneath the soil.
Everything is connected. Perhaps that is why forests feel alive in a way that no city can ever be.
Science offers one explanation for this feeling. The biophilia hypothesis, associated with biologist E. O. Wilson, proposes that human beings have an innate tendency to seek connections with the natural world. Research has also associated time spent in natural environments with reduced stress and improvements in aspects of psychological well-being. In Japan, the practice of shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing,” reflects a similar idea: sometimes, reconnecting with nature is also a way of reconnecting with ourselves.
But I think there is another explanation—one that science alone cannot completely describe.
Maybe trees remind us of the people we hope to become.
They do not rush. They do not compare themselves with the trees beside them. They lose their leaves without fearing that they will never bloom again. They survive storms not because they are unbreakable, but because they know when to bend.
And perhaps that is what I find most comforting about them.
In a world that constantly asks us to become more faster, better, louder, and more successful—trees quietly teach us something else. How to simply be.
The forests of Northeast India are among the world’s richest and most diverse ecosystems. From the rainforests of Dehing Patkai to the grasslands and wetlands of Kaziranga, from ancient fig trees that feed entire communities of birds to the evergreen forests where hoolock gibbons move through the canopy, every landscape carries stories that took generations to unfold.
But those stories are fragile. A forest that disappears cannot simply be recreated within a human lifetime. An ancient tree cannot be replaced by a sapling overnight. When we lose a forest, we lose more than trees. We lose relationships between species, habitats shaped over centuries, memories written into landscapes, and possibilities that future generations may never get to experience.
People often ask why forests should be protected. For me, the answer has never begun with climate change or biodiversity, important as they are.
It begins with a feeling. It begins with the quiet comfort of standing beneath something older than me.
It begins with looking up at a tree and realizing that it has survived seasons I will never know; it has witnessed lives I will never hear about, and continued growing without ever needing to prove that it deserved to exist.
Maybe that is why I feel at home among trees. Because every time I stand before one, I remember that home is not always a place built with walls. Sometimes. home has roots. Sometimes, it reaches towards the sky, and sometimes, without saying a single word, it reminds us who we have been all along.
