Ecology within me
What women are learning from the ecologies they live with
Lately, we’ve been sitting with a simple question: What has the ecology around you taught you?
We have been listening to women from different walks of life share lessons they’ve learned from trees, plants, seasons, and landscapes they live with. Beneath these stories runs a deeper curiosity about how ecology shapes memory, how it holds community, and how it quietly mirrors our inner worlds and wellbeing.
Three stories, in particular, have stayed with us.
Pooja, an educator from Delhi, spoke about a lemon tree in her backyard. The original tree was planted by her grandmother in their ancestral home in Punjab. When her grandmother’s children moved away, each carried a sapling with them and planted it in their own homes. “My Nani (grandmother) passed away at some point, my mother passed away 10 years after her, and her other children passed away too. So everyone who brought that offshoot is gone. But those trees are there in all of their homes. So, it connects us to our heritage, too.” When we reflect on her story, we see that the tree is not just a plant. It’s a living thread connecting generations, memory, and belonging.
Tapshi, a writer from Bangalore, shared her relationship with a mahogany tree outside her old home. She described watching it move through seasons—lush and green in summer, turning red in autumn, standing bare through winter, and returning in spring. Over time, the tree taught her something simple and profound. She shares, “Seasons come and go, and so do emotions. If there are seasons in life, we might as well live them fully. The trees go through this wholeheartedly. If you are in grief, grieve fully. If you are joyful, be unabashedly joyful.” It taught us that nothing stays forever, and that is part of the cycle.
Binita, a psychotherapist from Mumbai, shared a different kind of connection. While travelling through unfamiliar countries, surrounded by new languages and cultures, she found comfort in visiting parks. Trees, she noticed, are the same everywhere. “Yes, the space is new,” she shares, “but in terms of what it holds is not new. It is what I’ve always known. We’ve always known for the environment to have birds, trees, and insects…there is so much of it in our subconscious that we feel supported in whichever system these elements exist. The familiarity is in our consciousness.”
Listening to these stories, we are beginning to see how landscapes carry memory, how trees hold lessons about time and change, and how nature often reflects emotions we’re still learning to name.
We’re curious to know: what is the ecology around you mirroring back to you?
Learning from what surrounds us,
Team FUEL
These lessons are part of 1 Million Voices of Women in Ecology, a participative repository of women's wisdom on ecology and everyday ways they care about the world. If you have a lesson to share, please share it with us here.
Tapshis observation about seasons teaching her to live emotions fully is powerful. I had a similar experince with a cherry blossom tree near my apartment - watched it bloom and die back every year, which oddly made me more okay with temporary setbacks at work. The tree doesnt resist the cycle, it just fuels itself diffferently in each season.