Doing enough vs. burning out

Your ecosystem needs you to give, but not to give it all.

Mar 15, 2024

— Das Rush

Last year, around this time, I spent a long time walking in the woods, thinking about what the trees had to teach us about living in healthy ecosystems. I had just read Suzanne Simard’s “Finding the Mother Tree,” and was struck by the way she described the generosity of trees.

From Simard’s beautiful work, I think we can learn many lessons about how to be in community in sustainable ways. For example:

Forests are anchored by “Mother Tree” — keystone plant species and individuals that allow whole ecosystems to thrive, through acts of coordinated care. When these Mother Trees reach maturity, they will send nutrients to their seedlings, often planted just around her “drip line,” throughout their lives, to ensure they grow tall and strong.
When a section of the forest is razed for logging, trees around the periphery will send in new seeds, then work to connect the seedlings that grow to the existing underground system of nutrient exchange to ensure those seedlings grow tall and strong too.
When trees are sick, their neighbors send them nutrients through underground root systems, nurturing them until they’re well enough to begin thriving on their own again.
These tree villages make some distinction between species, but not nearly as much distinction as you’d think. Birch and fir support each other readily; their differences make them complementary species rather than enemies. Remove one from the ecosystem to help the other “compete” — as foresters once did in stands of profitable fir trees, removing birch because they thought it would help the fir to grow better — and instead, they wither.
Notably, however, no tree gives all or even most of their nutrients to another organism, not even to their children, until that tree’s death is imminent. (At this point, trees “bequeath” the vast majority of their nutrients to the beings around them, much as a person might in their will.)

Clearly, we humans have lost touch with nature’s intuitive dance of give-and-take, between self and other, in service of our collective thriving. But I hope that one day we can regain it.

I see reasons to hope every day. Below, I’ve included several. These resources and calls to action all offer the invitation to engage in what Paolo Freire calls true “praxis.” That is, a cycle of reflecting, and doing, then reflecting again, on how best to call a more balanced world into being.

What’s bringing me hope in this season

I’ve been inspired daily by the work of World Central Kitchen, which has more or less side-stepped distinctions of nationality — much like trees who pay little attention to distinctions of birch or fir. They have offered food and capacity-building support to all sides of the conflict in the Middle East, as well as in other struggling communities around the world.
I was glad to help my friend Ashley Locke, whom I interviewed here, to source this story about the facts of IVF, for those who are still struggling to understand or act on the implications of this recent court ruling in Alabama. Her interviewee, Belle Boggs, wrote The Art of Waiting, a memoir which helped me enormously in the early days of my battle with infertility: check it out here. Indivisible.org, which built up enormous capacity in the wake of the 2016 elections, also has a great campaign and call to action for this here.
As some readers here know, I work part-time as a support group facilitator at RTZ Hope, which creates additional root system connections between birthing people who have been recently impacted by harmful reproductive legislation and mentors who have moved through and healed from their own initiations in infertility and loss. I’m continuously inspired in this work by my fellow co-facilitators, reproductive justice advocates and Mother Trees, including Jess Van Wyen (also interviewed here and here). If you know someone who is currently healing from pregnancy or infant loss, and would like to connect with community in a trauma-informed, queer-affirming, antiracist environment, please send them to https://rtzhope.org/register.
I appreciated the way
Christopher Pepper
has used his expertise as an educator to pull together this recent resource for talking about Nex Benedict, and taking action on behalf of trans youth.
I’ve also been in deep talks recently with my friend Das Rush (interviewed here) about other ways to offer allyship to trans loved ones during this time. Das, who identifies as trans, pointed out that all of the crises above, while they seem unrelated, are actually all connected, in one big mycelial web: whether you are living in a trans body, a birthing body, or a body stranded in the borderlands between man-made lines on a map, “our bodies are contested territory.”
Thinking about all of the above struggles to survive in “contested territory” as connected has helped me to feel good about the work I’m doing inside the boundaries of my own “drip line,” even if my capacity and expertise are not infinite. It means we don’t have to do it all, all at once, all the time.

“May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.” — Mary Oliver

In each of the situations above, someone stepped forward to use their lived experience and professional expertise to respond quickly and competently to a situation in which they already had deep expertise — while also maintaining and building ongoing capacity for that work to continue. This is Mother Tree work.

This generous give-and-take approach offers a healthy alternative to some of the other trends I’ve been seeing lately. I.e.

Some of us have begun confusing real activism and bravery with the creation of social media content. Creating a lovely Canva carousel can be very helpful for the purpose of education, reflection and even collective grief. It’s a useful skillset. But it is not, in and itself, the same as political action. Unless you are a celebrity or a billionaire, it is unlikely that the local reps and overseas leaders who are calling the shots right now are viewing your reels. Please don’t let “speaking out” on socials be the primary form of your activism. If you are calling and writing your congresspeople, or you’re showing up in person to offer a meal or an ear to those in need, but not posting on social media, this is still effective activism.
Some of us have begun to confuse acts of authentic, compassionate witnessing, which are best done in real non-hierarchical relationship, with the pressure to engage in doom-scrolling behavior. The former has benefits for all involved in this act of co-regulation, and can increase our individual capacity to heal from trauma and take brave action. But doom-scrolling is associated with a battery of poor health outcomes that strip our capacity to do the work that’s needed in the world. Moreover, the creation and consumption of content that objectifies suffering human beings in the service of philanthropy, rather than centering their dignity, agency, creativity and wholeness, comes with its own problems. (For more on why, see
Anne Helen Petersen
in conversation with Amy Schiller here.) If you’re engaging in a few minutes a day of responsible news consumption, taking some small action to heal a hurt or honor another’s humanity, then taking some time to breathe, reflect and rest, this is still effective activism.
As Becca Piastrelli discusses here, many of us have become too used to relying on a small number of deeply caring people, people who are all-too-often giving at full capacity already, to salve the wounds of the world. We’ve created entirely separate social classes of “tenders” and “tended” (or, more ominously, classes of “policed” and “policers”) rather than creating a world in which every community member can resolve conflicts, contribute what they can, and receive help as they need. If you’re already a nurse, teacher, therapist or other maxed-out caregiver, and you’re still managing to do your job under the current difficult conditions, this is still effective activism.
We engage in the above distractions while people with far more power and influence over the problems we face continue to hoard resources and engage in dehumanizing rhetoric to justify this behavior — and we fail to hold them accountable. We get all fired up about a friend’s “appalling post,” but continue to allow what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “Windigo thinking,” in Braiding Sweetgrass, on a more widespread societal scale.
As Kimmerer writes:

In the old times, individuals who endangered the community by taking too much for themselves were first counseled, then ostracized, and if the greed continued, they were eventually banished. The Windigo myth may have arisen from the remembrance of the banished, doomed to wander hungry and alone, wreaking vengeance on the ones who spurned them. It is a terrible punishment to be banished from the web of reciprocity, with no one to share with you and no one for you to care for.

If you’re working to care and share without taking too much for yourself, and working to hold others accountable for not taking more than they need, this is still effective activism.

If you have been contributing to the collective liberation this week in ways big or small, I invite you to take a breath now, and consider how you might fill up your own nutrient stores for the work ahead. And to release any guilt or shame for not “giving your all.”

Remember: Among trees, “your all” is never required for beings who desire to live to give another day. “Your enough” is quite enough.

Here are a few ways you might resource yourself this week:

Peruse this roundup of resources from last year on rest and reciprocity.
Journal on what work is truly calling you in this moment, and let the rest go.
Explore this series of short meditative practices from last week, created by Kristin Neff especially for caregivers.
Try this mindfulness exercise that invites you to consider: what does your body actually want? And then go do that.

The work will still be here when you’re finished, I promise.

What work is calling to you in this season? What does it mean for you to rest in between giving seasons? And how do you balance the two? Asking for a frequently-burned out friend…

In Tending

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