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in·os·cu·late
verb: i-ˈnä-skyə-ˌlāt
inosculated; inosculating
join, unite
inosculation
noun: (ˌ)i-ˌnä-skyə-ˈlā-shən
There is a tree that grows along the river where I walk each morning with my dog. Actually it is two trees fused so tightly together that it is hard to figure out where one ends and the other begins. It’s a not uncommon phenomenon in nature to see plants entwined this way. And what we have long noticed aboveground has become something we now know happens below ground, too, thanks to the work of Suzanne Simard. Simard tells us that forests are social, connected via underground networks — roots and rhizomes tangled together — that transfer nutrients and protection from one to another, based on need, based on mutual flourishing, to use Robin Wall Kimmerer’s phrase (“All flourishing is mutual,” says the author of Braiding Sweetgrass).
The term for this uniting is “inosculation.” It speaks to a fusing so complete that the organisms don’t exist separately any longer, but become a sort of hybrid new organism, as Maria Popova writes in Marginalia.
It seems noteworthy in our hyper individualistic, hyper partisan society, where we other people when they aren’t on our side, where even to lean on another feels like weakness. Where vulnerability is considered a liability.
Renowned environmentalist John Muir puts it best: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
