The Forest Knows How to Love

In 1997, ecologist Suzanne Simard published findings in Nature that quietly rewrote what we thought we knew about forests. Studying the Douglas fir woods of British Columbia, Simard discovered that trees are not solitary competitors — they are connected through vast underground fungal networks, threading from root to root across acres of soil. She called the oldest, largest trees in these networks "mother trees."

What she found next was almost pastoral. Mother trees actively send carbon and nutrients through these fungal threads to younger, struggling seedlings — and they preferentially favor their own kin, sending more generously to offspring they somehow recognize. Even more striking: when a mother tree is dying, rather than hoarding what remains, she sends a final pulse of resources outward — carbon, nitrogen, defense signals — a last gift to the forest she is leaving behind.

Love, it turns out, is stitched into the fabric of creation itself.

Paul wrote that love "does not seek its own" (1 Corinthians 13:5). For centuries we assumed that surviving meant competing, that strength meant holding on. But God built the world to run on something older and deeper than self-interest. The forest gives. The strong nourish the weak. The dying pour themselves out for those who will outlast them.