DW's Blog

The Stand

by DW Green — November 11, 2026

“On what a family actually is, and where it keeps it.”

“On what a family actually is, and where it keeps it.”

I am four days into a new house, surrounded by boxes, and I have been thinking about aspen trees.

It is a beautiful Tuesday in Phoenix, and the sky is the whole of it. Sky blue — the actual named shade, which is worth saying, because the sky is not that color most days. It is the blue San Diego wore and Los Angeles kept, and it is the finest color I know of. It runs as far as a man can see, with one wisp of cirrus somewhere in the distant distance. And I am sitting under it thinking about a stand of trees on a Colorado mountainside eight hundred miles north of here, which is not where I live and has not been for a very long time.

A man who has just pulled up his own roots finds himself thinking about the largest root system on earth. I do not think that requires much interpretation.

• • •

A hillside that is one tree

Here is the thing about aspens that stops people the first time they hear it.

A stand of aspen is frequently a single organism. Not a grove of individuals growing near one another — one being, with tens of thousands of stems rising out of one connected mass of root. What looks like a crowd of trees is a crowd of limbs.

Which is why a whole hillside goes gold in the same week while the hillside across the draw is still green. That is not agreement. That is not consensus or weather or luck.

It is one body remembering at once.

You can see where one family ends and the next begins by the timing of the color. From a highway, in the first week of October, the boundary between two separate organisms is perfectly visible and most people drive past it thinking they are looking at scenery.

• • •

The ratio

Now the number that reorganizes everything, and this is the one I did not have before this week. An individual aspen stem lives one hundred to one hundred thirty years.

The root system lives nine to sixteen thousand.

Read those twice. The part you can see, the part with the bark and the leaves and the name carved in it, is a visitor. It arrives, it stands up, it does its hundred years, and it goes. The part you cannot see has been there since before agriculture.

And no stem has the faintest idea. A trunk standing on that mountainside has no access whatsoever to the age of the thing it is standing on. It knows its own weather. It knows the stems beside it. That is the entire horizon of a trunk.

Which is, as far as I can tell, an exact description of being born into a family.

• • • Pando

The famous one is in Utah, in the Fishlake National Forest, and it has a name.

Forty-seven thousand stems. One hundred and six acres. Six thousand tons, which makes it one of the heaviest living things anybody has found. The root beneath it has been running, by current estimate, somewhere between nine and sixteen thousand years.

They call it Pando.

It is Latin, and it is a verb, and it is in the first person singular. I spread.

The largest organism on the planet is named with an I. Not the spreading one, not that which spreads — I spread, said as though the hillside were answering a question. A man who has spent two years writing I AM Tree and I AM CODA and I AM Discovery does not get to pretend he found that unremarkable.

• • •

Oneness, and the slip that caught it

Years ago, in Amba Gale’s coursework, we were asked to take stands and say them out loud. One of mine was that I stand for the oneness in all things.

Writing it out this week I typed newness instead, caught it, and found I did not want to fix it. My catalog has a history with slips — Stan became Satan became satin and produced two essays; remainder nearly lost its a and became reminder and produced a third — so I have learned to look at the wrong word before correcting it.

Newness works. And it works because it is the same stand said from the other side.

Consider what has to happen for anything to strike you as genuinely new. Not newly manufactured — new as in arriving, unfiled, never seen before. That happens at exactly one moment: when you stop holding the thing apart from yourself as an item you have already catalogued. The newness shows up the instant the separation drops.

Which is the oneness.

So a man cannot stand for one without standing for the other, and I have apparently been standing for both since before I could have told you why. Thomas Merton gave me the third name for it a couple of weeks ago, in a list he did not bother to explain: the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the newness, the emptiness and the purity of vision. Emptiness, newness, oneness. Three words, strung together with commas by a man who evidently could not decide which face of the thing to describe either.

And here is why I am putting this in an essay about trees.

An aspen reproduces by suckering. The root sends up new stems to replace the ones that are dying. That is the whole engine; it is how a thing stays alive for fourteen thousand years while every visible part of it keeps being replaced.

Which means that in an aspen, the oneness is the thing that manufactures the newness. Not a balance between the two. Not a tension to be managed. One connected root, and its entire occupation is making new.

Oneness is not sameness. Oneness is difference, wedded. Forty-seven thousand different stems, one root, and the root’s only job is more.

• • •

The word, which my own essay already handled

I asked myself this week whether aspens stand for something, and I made the pun on purpose, because a grove of aspen is called a stand.

And in October I wrote an essay arguing that to understand a thing is to stand among it — the “under” in that word is not our under at all but the old sense meaning in the midst of, the one still alive in the German unter uns, among us.

So: a stand of aspen is a company of stems standing among one another.

Except that in their case the standing-among is not a figure of speech. It is plumbing. They are joined under the dirt, and everything they appear to be doing separately is one thing done by one body.

I wrote that essay about knowing. The tree was doing it the whole time, and doing it literally, and has been since the last ice age.

And there is a second one sitting in the same root, which I did not have until this afternoon.

SUBSTANCE is Latin — sub and stare. That which stands under. The Romans built the word as a straight translation of the Greek hypostasis, which says the identical thing out of the identical parts: under, and standing.

So two languages, working separately, both concluded that the real part of a thing is the part standing underneath it.

Understand: to stand among. Substance: to stand under.

The aspen does both, and does them in wood. The stems stand among one another. And every ounce of their substance is standing under them where nobody can see it, nine thousand years old.

And the tree gets both of those for nothing. It stands among without being told, and its substance stands under whether or not anybody notices.

There is a third sense of the word — the kind of stand a person takes, out loud, in front of other people

and that one is ours alone. A tree has never had to declare anything.

• • •

Five trees off one root

I have written odes to my brothers and sisters, one at a time, over two years. They were the first things I wrote and they are the reason everything after them exists.

And the thing that strikes me, laying them beside each other, is how little the five of us resemble one another.

Mike is the eldest and the artist, the one who showed the way, the one I read his own ode to in October while the girls were out shopping.

Pat is the quiet loving presence, the blessing-giver, the one who shows up without fanfare and does not require that anyone notice.

Barb is friend to all — magnanimity with a face on it — the one who has never once gone looking for friendship because friendship comes looking for her.

Brett is the wholehearted. Whatever he does, he does entirely. He chose presence over promotion, which is not a choice most men make, and he signs off with Hee Hee!

And me, still in progress, working out that I am the coda — the one who brings it home.

Five stems. One root. Not one of us is a copy of another, and nobody who met us separately would guess.

• • •

Which raises a problem

Here are two true things, and they point in opposite directions.

An aspen clone is genetically identical — every stem the same code, exactly — and the stems still differ. Different heights. Different bends. Different scars where lower branches let go. Same instructions, different wind, and the wind did the rest.

Siblings are genetically different — we share about half, which is to say we are not clones by any stretch

and we are unmistakably one family anyway. Anybody who has spent an afternoon with the five of us knows it in ten minutes, and could not tell you what it is they are recognizing.

Same genes, different trees. Different genes, same signature.

So the genes are clearly not the root system. They are at best the soil chemistry. Something else is doing the connecting, and it is not in the chromosomes.

• • •

What actually runs underground

I think I know what it is, because I have spent two years cataloging it without realizing that is what I was doing.

It is the sayings.

My father said D is for Delicious Delish! and Fan Fan-Tastic! and great minds travel the same path, and he said them so often that all five of us can hear them in his voice, and the man has been gone for years.

My mother handed me for the life of me, which I now carry around as a koan and did not know was an inheritance until I noticed I had never heard anybody else say it quite that way.

Brett has Hee Hee!

And underneath all of it, the one that made me: a promise my father made over the body of his best friend in the Ardennes, that his next son would carry the man’s name so the man would not vanish. My legal first name is two letters. They are not initials for anything. They are initials of someone.

That is the root system. Not the DNA — the phrases. The names. The stories that get said at the table until nobody can remember who said them first.

A name with no paper survives only in the mouths still saying it. I wrote that line about my father’s friend. It turns out to be a description of how a family is actually wired together: a connected mass of language under the dirt, out of which the visible people rise, each for their hundred years, each shaped by their own weather, all of them going gold in the same week without having discussed it.

• • •

The stems go

I am seventy-five. My parents are gone. The brother who is the eldest, the one whose ode started all of this, is at home in Twin Falls, and does not always have the words anymore.

And I have a neck that a surgeon says needs an answer, and two strokes behind me, and a new house with lower ceilings that I am still learning to breathe in.

The stems go. That is what stems do. A hundred to a hundred and thirty years, and nobody gets an extension, and the root does not grieve them because the root has been through this ten thousand times.

That part is not the tragedy. That part is the design.

• • •

What is actually killing Pando

Here is the fact that stopped me cold, and it is the reason this essay exists.

Pando is in trouble. Not from fire — it has survived every fire that ever crossed that mountain, because the flames take the stems and the root simply sends up new ones afterward. Not from drought, particularly. Not from age.

It is deer and elk. They eat the young shoots before the shoots can get tall enough to be trees.

A thing that has stood for fourteen thousand years, that has outlived every blaze and every winter and every single one of its forty-seven thousand visible trunks, is now at risk because nothing is being allowed to grow up.

That is not death. Death it has handled, continuously, for longer than there have been cities. It is a failure of succession.

And that is the thing I would say to anybody with a family, which is everybody. A line does not end when the old ones go. The old ones always go; that has never once been the problem. A line ends when nothing replaces them — when the new shoots come up and get eaten before they are tall enough to count. When nobody tells the grandchildren what their great-grandfather said about dinner. When the phrases stop being said out loud and start being things that used to be said.

What the forest service did for Pando, when they finally understood the problem, was put up a fence.

• • •

I have been writing odes to my brothers and sisters for two years and telling myself I was being sentimental about old people.

I was building a fence.

Every saying I write down, every name I keep, every story I make somebody sit still for — that is one more young stem given enough time to get above the browse line. The catalog is not a memorial. A memorial is for things that are over. This is horticulture.

So: do aspens stand for something?

They stand for each other, which they manage by not being separate in the first place. They stand on something nine thousand years old that none of them has ever seen. And every hundred years or so they hand the whole business over to stems that were not there for any of it, and will not know, and will go gold in the same week anyway.

Forty-seven thousand trunks on one root in Utah, and the name on the sign is a verb, first person, present tense.

I spread.

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