HOW I BECAME A TREE

In this remarkable and often
unsettling book, Sumana Roy gives us a new vision of what it means to be
human in the natural world. Increasingly disturbed by the violence, hate,
insincerity, greed and selfishness of her kind, the author is drawn to the
idea of becoming a tree. ?I was tired of speed?, she writes, ?I wanted to
live to tree time.? Besides wanting to emulate the spacious, relaxed rhythm
of trees, she is drawn to their non-violent ways of being, how they tread
lightly upon the earth, their ability to cope with loneliness and pain, the
unselfishness with which they give freely of themselves and much more. She
gives us new readings of the works of writers, painters, photographers and
poets (Rabindranath Tagore and D. H. Lawrence among them) to show how trees
and plants have always fascinated us. She studies the work of remarkable
scientists like Jagadish Chandra Bose and key spiritual figures like the
Buddha to gain even deeper insights into the world of trees. She writes of
those who have wondered what it would be like to have sex with a tree, looks
into why people marry trees, explores the death and rebirth of trees and
tells us why a tree was thought by forest-dwellers to be equal to ten
sons.Mixing memoir, literary history, nature studies, spiritual philosophies
and botanical research, How I Became a Tree is a book that will prompt
readers to think of themselves and the natural world that they are an
intrinsic part of, in fresh ways. It is that rarest of things – A truly
original work of art.