Dear Stoics,

We have always gone to trees for comfort: children climb them, lovers carve their names into them, the exhausted sit beneath them. Long before anyone could explain why, people have known that something about a tree makes them feel calmer and steadier. Lately, science has caught up with that instinct, and what it found makes trees resemble wise teachers we could all look up to.

The first thing we learned is that trees look after one another. When insects or disease attack a tree, it releases a scent into the air so that the trees nearby can prepare themselves, toughening their leaves before the danger reaches them. Some even send out a second scent that calls in the wasps that prey on the attackers. Beneath the soil, the trees are connected by tiny fungus threads, and through them they may also share things with each other, like nutrients or signals. In other words, a forest is a community that passes along warnings and help.

The second thing we learned is that trees look after us, too. The scents a forest exhales (the same ones the trees use to defend themselves) are called phytoncides, and when we breathe them, our own immune cells grow more active and stay that way for some time. This is exactly what the Japanese practice of forest bathing is based on. The chemistry a tree makes to protect itself turns out to protect the person resting beneath it.

So what can we ourselves learn from the trees? First, that we should say when we are hurt. A wounded tree does not suffer in private; it tells the whole forest right away. Most of the time, we do the opposite: we go quiet when something wounds us and think the silence is the ultimate strength.

Another lesson is that sincere care asks nothing in return. A tree shades whoever sits beneath it; it heals someone who will never learn its name or come back to care for it. It warns the whole forest, not only its own kind, with no expectations and no need to be thanked. Think about it for a second: don’t most of our own good deeds come with a “you owe me” for the future? Trees don’t do that, and that’s exactly why we keep coming back to them, seeking their peaceful stability.

Speaking of stability, it is itself a form of love. A tree cannot leave the place where it was planted; it grows one ring each year in the climate it did not choose. The people who have mattered most to us were often like this: reliable, always there to count on, in the same place in our hearts, year after year. It’s actually easy to be a tree for someone — just be there for them.

This week, in your journal, ask yourself: who has been a tree in your life, and when did you last appreciate that? Who could use a little of your shade? Then, if you can, go and stand among some trees and breathe in their healing scents. Maybe something in that air will give you exactly what you need right now.

Yours truly,
The Stoic App Team

P.S. For anyone who’d like to wander a little deeper into the forest, here’s the science behind this letter:

Forest Bathing and Preventive Medicine - a 2026 review

Plants Might Be Cooperating and “Talking” to Each Other - the sagebrush experiments

A Biologist Explains How Trees “Talk” To Each Other

Effect of Phytoncide from Trees on Human Natural Killer Cell Function

Some things don’t just happen to us; they swallow us whole like a book that eats an entire weekend, or a special someone who takes your every thought. This week’s theme, On Engulfment, looks at those moments of total immersion and at what all that intensity means to us.

When did you last completely lose track of time? What book, show, or piece of music consumed you entirely? What feeling has been reaching you the fastest lately? Open your journal and start with the last thing that swallowed you, with curiosity about what it gave you.