Sit with SMB: Your Place in the Family of Things
Episode Summary
Many of us spend our lives trying to prove ourselves worthy—of success, of love, of rest, of belonging. Nature offers a different perspective.
Trees do not strive to become trees. Geese do not earn their place in the sky. They participate fully in life simply by being what they are.
In this reflective solo episode, Susan explores what a white pine, the approaching solstice, and the rhythms of the natural world can teach us about belonging, loss, and the quiet transformations that shape our lives.
Sometimes nature's greatest lessons arrive not through what remains, but through what changes form.
Show Notes
As we approach the summer solstice—the longest light of the year—nature offers a quiet reminder: belonging isn't something we earn. It's something we already have.
In this Sit with SMB episode, Susan reflects on the loss of a beloved hundred-year-old white pine that stood in her yard for decades. A triple-topped tree with deep roots and a steady presence, it became an unexpected teacher about grief, gratitude, and the ways nature continues its cycles even when they don't unfold as we imagined.
Drawing inspiration from the writings of Mary Oliver and her own experience saying goodbye to the tree long before it came down, Susan explores what it means to be part of the family of things. The conversation moves through themes of belonging, nature's wisdom, interrupted cycles, and the permission we receive from the natural world to simply be ourselves.
This episode is an invitation to consider how nature holds both endings and continuations at the same time—and how what appears to be loss may sometimes be transformation.
As the solstice approaches, Susan leaves listeners with a gentle question:
What in your life might be ready to change form?
Key Themes
Belonging as an inherent part of being alive
Nature's invitation to stop striving and simply be
Grief as a natural season rather than a problem to solve
The lessons hidden within interrupted cycles
Transformation and continuity in natural systems
The wisdom of trees and the experience of being among them
The summer solstice as a reminder of nature's rhythms
Finding ourselves within the larger family of life
Key Takeaways
Nature does not require us to earn our place; belonging is already ours.
Grief often begins before a loss occurs and deserves space to be honored.
What appears to be an ending may simply be a change in form.
Ecosystems remind us that little is truly wasted; life continually transforms and redistributes.
Time spent among trees can shift both our bodies and our perspective.
The natural world offers permission to go easy, be filled, and shine in our own way.
"Nature isn't offering us a place in the family of things.
It's announcing one that was never in question."
Resources Mentioned
Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
Mary Oliver, When I Am Among the Trees
Reflection Prompt
What in your life might be ready to change form?
Prefer to read? The full transcript is below.
-
Susan:
Welcome to Rooted: A Podcast About Nature & Wellbeing.
I'm Susan Morgan Bailey.
This is a Sit with SMB episode—a space for reflection, curiosity, and noticing what nature might be teaching us about ourselves.
Here on Rooted, we explore the intersection of nature, wellbeing, and modern life. The ways connecting with nature—and remembering that we are nature—can help us feel more grounded, more whole, and more fully alive.
I'm glad you're here.
We are days away from the summer solstice.
The longest light of the year. The northern hemisphere leaning all the way toward the sun—not straining, not working for it. Just turning. The way living things do.
Right now, out there—and maybe right where you are if you're near a window, or outside—nature is in full expression. Not becoming. Not preparing. Not optimizing.
Just being. Completely. Without apology.
That's what this episode is about.
I want to start with a poet. Mary Oliver spent her life paying close attention to the natural world and writing down what she found there. And what she found, over and over, was us—reflected back. The way a green mirror works.
One of her poems begins with six words I keep coming back to.
"You do not have to be good."
Just that.
You don't have to be good.
You don't have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles repenting. You don't have to earn your place.
And then she writes that you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
The soft animal.
Not the performing, achieving, optimizing human.
The animal.
The creature that is already nature, already woven in, already part of all of this.
I think about how much energy so many of us spend trying to be good enough. Trying to justify our presence—in our work, in our relationships, in our own lives. As if belonging is something we can lose.
And then I think about the trees.
Has a white pine ever wondered if it was good enough to be a white pine?
The poem ends with the image of the world calling to you—over and over—announcing your place in the family of things.
Not offering it.
Not granting it based on merit.
Announcing it.
Like it was never in question.
Like it was always already true.
Your place.
In the family of things.
Which is another way of saying: in nature.
Which is another way of saying: you already belong here.
I want to tell you about a tree.
A white pine that grew in my yard.
A hundred years old—which sounds ancient, but white pines can live two hundred, even four hundred years. This one was young, really. It had so much living ahead of it.
I loved everything about it.
The way the needles bundle together in groups of five—one for each letter in its name. W-H-I-T-E. Five needles.
I loved the sound of wind moving through white pine needles. It's unlike any other sound in the forest—softer, almost like breathing.
I loved curling up underneath it, the needles on the ground creating something just nurturing. A kind of shelter.
And I loved that this tree was a triple-topper.
That's what the arborist called it.
Three full crowns grown from a single base.
Three whole lives reaching up from one root system.
I had never even noticed that. I just knew it was big and full and tall.
I had to lose it to really see it.
Because we did lose it.
The roots were impacting the infrastructure of our home. The tree had to come down.
I started mourning it last summer—before it was gone.
I would go stand near it and simply say thank you.
Sometimes apologize a little.
Be grateful for its hundred years of presence.
That probably sounds strange to some people.
But it didn't feel strange.
It felt true.
And I've been thinking about that—the mourning before the loss.
How that itself is something nature teaches.
Not rushing past things.
Not waiting until something is gone to love it.
Letting grief have its season.
In early spring, it came down.
And I still feel a small ache when I think about it.
But here's what I keep returning to:
The tree's cycle wasn't finished.
It was interrupted.
Nature doesn't always follow the arc we imagine for things.
A hundred-year-old tree comes down before its time.
Cycles get cut short.
Things end before we think they should—in the forest and in our lives.
And yet, the cycle continued anyway.
Just in a different form.
We kept some of the wood.
Others will get some of it.
It will warm people's homes this winter.
It will be at the center of campfires where memories are being made.
Children will roast marshmallows over that wood.
People will sit around that light and say things they needed to say.
Nature rarely wastes anything.
In ecosystems, one form becomes another.
What looks like an ending is often a redistribution.
Nothing lost.
Just moving.
Changing form.
The way nature does.
That tree belonged completely for a hundred years.
It didn't strive or perform or justify its existence.
It was simply—fully, all the way to three tops from one root—itself.
And then it let go.
And it's still here.
Just differently.
My bumper sticker says:
May the Forest Be With You.
Yes, I'm a nature girl.
Yes, I also love Star Wars.
These things coexist.
But I mean it as more than a joke.
Because when I'm among trees—really among them, not just passing through—something in me softens.
Something lets go.
There's no work to be done here.
No optimization.
No performance review.
Scientists have measured some of what happens when we're among trees.
Pine forests release compounds called phytoncides, and our bodies respond.
Stress hormones decrease.
Blood pressure eases.
But long before the science, many of us already knew the feeling.
The forest is doing something to us before our minds can explain it.
And maybe part of what we're feeling is simpler than biology.
The trees are just being.
Fully.
Without apology.
And when you're in the presence of something that has never once questioned its right to exist, it gives you permission to do the same.
Mary Oliver writes about this—being among the trees and feeling them teach her something.
Not in words.
But in the way they are.
That she, too, has come into the world to do this.
To be filled.
To go easy.
To shine.
To go easy.
Not lazy.
Not checked out.
Not passive.
Easy—the way the white pine was easy in the wind.
The way the trees at the solstice are easy in the long light.
Just turning toward it.
Just being fully what they are.
We're leaning into the solstice.
The longest light.
And the solstice is itself a cycle—the peak of the light that also begins the slow turning back toward dark.
Even the longest day contains the beginning of less.
Nature holds both at once.
Without contradiction.
Without resistance.
We're in that.
All of us.
The trees.
The geese.
The white pine wood warming someone's home.
You.
Me.
We're in the family of things.
Our place already announced.
I've been sitting with a question lately, and I want to leave it with you.
What in your life are you being invited to let change form?
Not forced.
Not before its time.
But something that might be ready to become something new.
I don't have my own answer to that yet.
Maybe that's a question worth carrying into the long light.
May the forest be with you.
Buen Camino.
