Confessions of A Tree Planter

BY ARIEL TOZMAN

the northern Canadian landscape. For eight or more hours, I slammed my shovel into the ground repeatedly. I emerged with increasingly purple feet and cuts all over my legs from tripping over wet logs and twigs. But, delivered from the bush to my friends each day, I was grateful. I owe that newfound sense of gratitude to the absence of my phone. Stripped of access to social media, I ceased to obsessively compare myself to others. In the terrifying, breathtaking bush, the world shifted beyond the borders of my anxiety, borders drawn according to the painted and digitized worlds of others. My vision simultaneously narrowed to how small I stood in the shade of those pine trees and expanded to the way black spruce leaves look as if they’re fipping you off. For the frst time in so long, the stranglehold social media had locked me in loosened enough that I could breathe. Muddy and exhausted, but free, I took stock of who I was when no one was around to see but the broad pines and middle-fngered leaves.

A book I once read called Ways of Seeing by John Berger intimately captures the way social media had smothered my sense of person. It talks about how people socialized as women are conditioned to envisage themselves by capitalism/the patriarchy, explaining how the pro- liferation of the digital image has deepened our power of observation. Women are acutely perceptive, rendering us extra-sensitive to how others receive us. Somewhere in this cycle the digital image had taken over my life, objectifying me, repressing me, hopelessly and endlessly leaving me alone with my refection – that mirror image of myself I was never satisfed with. As the camera rendered me consumable, I succumbed to the economic principle of obsoletion, in which my body and hair and face were interchangeably tossed aside and recycled – like the plastic parts of a Polly Pocket. I lived my life through mirrors, in endless loops of self-hatred and self-obsession. As you might have felt yourself, this age-old dance is pretty exhausting and pointless; after all, we can never attain the unattainable. We will never be good enough for ourselves as long as we remain caught in the spiderweb of digital complacency. Overloaded by the negative feedback I received from my phone or the minute rejections I read in those around me, I coped with my anxiety by avoiding the things that scared me. But you know that saying – that life starts outside of your comfort zone? Unwittingly released from my screen, I gave myself over to the wilderness; alone in the woods, my sense of self rematerialized. In teaching me to stop letting others affect how I feel about myself, tree planting has awakened me to earth’s many graces, from little blue butterfies to the smiles of the people I love. In the grand scheme of things, we are like four-second shooting stars to the earth’s four-billion-year history, so what’s the point of spending our time comparing ourselves to others? Of letting what we think others are thinking affect how we live our lives? Put down your phone. Go outside. Live like no one is watching.

BY HENRY CEFFALIO