I. Water and Tree/Wood

In Chinese cosmology, water generates wood; this is not a metaphor but an observation of how the world works. Water rises and transforms into a tree, entrusting its invisibility to the trunk. The tree is water’s body; its vertical memory. Water flows horizontally across the earth, but in the tree, it learns to ascend, toward light, toward sky, toward what it once was among the clouds.

I learned this conceptually much later. As a child, I only knew my eucalyptus. I would spend hours in its branches, carrying my radio, drifting away from the world below. The tree protected me, from bullies, from fears, from invisible monsters. I couldn't name it then, but now I know: I was sheltering in water’s body. I could feel it moving inside the trunk, a slow pulse, a rising. The water circulating through its veins was the same water that had fallen on my mother’s village; it had passed through the lands where ancestors walked and risen again. The tree was making visible the memory I could not see.

The eucalyptus did not belong to these lands. It was brought to Anatolia during Ottoman modernization to “dry the marshes” and fight malaria; it soon became a species that drew water and changed the fate of the soil. It drank deeply and insatiably, storing hundreds of kilograms of water in its massive trunk—water that would never reach other roots.

Draining the marshes eliminated not only diseases but also common living spaces; property relations were rewritten. Thus, the tree became a symbol of power established over water and land. For me, it was both exile and refuge. It was a strange tree; perhaps I was a bit strange too. As its roots reached into underground waters, I made a place for myself in its branches. The bond between us was a silent agreement forged between wounds and displacement: water was a force that both heals and diminishes, and the tree was where it paused and turned into memory.

II. The Cypress

Years passed. The eucalyptus remained in childhood; fears changed; monsters grew. Then a gift arrived: a cypress seedling from my Pir, Piro Kasım. At first, I didn’t know how to relate to it; it was a sacred tree, and I had to be careful. Over time, I understood that every tree is sacred; the cypress only made this visible. In the Alevi tradition, water and trees have an owner; sometimes they appear in dreams. As my Pir’s daughter Yasemin said, a tree can call you in a dream. After that day, the cypress ceased to be just a plant. It became a subject that saw me, responded to my presence, and kept secrets. Nature was no longer a backdrop; it was a living, responsive being. This understanding overlapped with the world I felt in Hayao Miyazaki’s films—a world where nature is a subject, establishing a realm of existence equal to humans.

My ritual began this way. Every morning and evening on my balcony in Yeldeğirmeni, I raise my hands to the sky. Not to ask for things, but to stay good, to be just, to protect the earth. My prayers become invisible threads connecting me to birds, to ants, to water, to my tree. Every evening, I give water to my cypress. I watch it disappear into the soil, then imagine its journey upward through the trunk, carrying my intention with it. I clean its dry branches; I turn it toward the sun. It is eight years old now. It needs a forest, a place where it won’t be burned, where it will be safe. I dream of growing new trees from its seeds, of establishing a grove from this single companion. The cypress became a bridge for me between exile and rootedness; between flowing water and remembering water. Every watering is a conversation across time—the same gesture my grandmother made at the village spring, the same offering. In the midst of political and ecological destruction, it opened a fragile but stubborn space of hope that carries memory and resistance.

III. Roots

As the cypress grew, the question of roots also grew. Roots are water’s memory underground; they know where to find it, how to hold it, when to let it rise. My mother’s village was a small place hidden in the mountains of Erzurum, among trees and springs. The elders would tell how our family came from the Bexiz tribe, Zaza Alevis, displaced from place to place. Before that, Dersim. Before that, who knows? The names of mountains and rivers carry sounds older than the languages we speak. In that village, everyone knew: water and trees have owners. Before taking water from a spring, you ask permission. You don’t cut a branch from the old poplar; you tie a cloth to its trunk—a greeting, a reminder: I see you. I remember we share this water. A tree is not just a plant; it is the vertical form of memory. Water is not just flow; it is an invisible trace carried from generation to generation.

Burning in these lands is not only about fire; it is also about being left without water. Fire takes the tree, but thirst takes the memory, and memory is harder to restore. When trees are burned, not only trunks but memories turn to ash. When streams dry up, not only water but voice withdraws. But the Alevi tradition says something else: The burning tree also remembers the one who gave it water. The one who shaded it, the one who cut it. Memory is not one-way. That’s why in the story told, the burnt wood is planted back in the earth. First, you must make it green again. Because water’s promise is this: even in ash, life is hidden. What has burned can sprout again when it finds water. Perhaps the path to forgiveness lies not in denying the fire, but in calling water back.

IV. The Seed Wallet

As my cypress grew, something else happened: not only its trunk but its seeds multiplied. It became a cypress producing abundance. Every small cone falling from its branches was a tangible sign of continuity. With those seeds, the idea of collecting seeds also settled into my life. Now, every time I return from the village, I bring back not only memories but tree seeds. From walnuts to poplars, I collect the traces left on the ground by every tree I encounter. As if each were a call from a different root.

For eight years, I have carried a small wallet. Inside are seeds from my cypress and from plants I have collected on my journeys, along village roads, at forest edges. Each carries a memory, a ritual, a secret hidden in the soil. Each contains water, dormant, waiting—a tiny ocean folded into stillness. My mother believes they will protect me. When someone in the family dies, I plant one of those seeds on their grave. The first rain wakes it; the water underground finds it; the seed remembers what to do. Each seed placed in the earth becomes a ritual holding onto the past and a bridge reaching toward the future. I keep one for my own grave, too. Perhaps the only thing I will take to my grave will be this: the seeds I have collected in a wallet, and the possibility of sprouting again hidden within them—water’s promise that death is not the end, only a different kind of waiting.

V. The Forest’s Water

I grew up apart from my mother. That’s a long story, full of familiar sorrows. One day, she came to me carrying an ordinary plastic bottle. Inside was water from the sacred spring in her village, flowing from the Dala Qeske forest. That water became a bridge spanning years of separation. It carried my mother's childhood, the things she never said, the self she kept hidden beneath her skin. It carried the forest itself, its shadows, its silences, the memory of every creature that had drunk from it.

The stories about Dala Qeske were mixed with fear and respect: they said branches cut for burning would turn into snakes, that those who entered with axes would have their arms paralyzed, that people fleeing war had turned into trees and hidden there. The tree was not just a plant; it was a refuge, a protector, a carrier of living memory. This mythology merged with the forest beings in the tales my grandmother told me as a child. Fairies, witches, invisible creatures living inside trees… The village narratives and my childhood imagination intertwined.

My mother would tell her secrets to that water: the sea she saw for the first time, the airplanes heading to other countries, the ships, the lives she could not live. Water listens. Water remembers. Water carries. When she handed me the bottle, I understood that water does not ask where it flows from. It simply flows. And as it flows, it connects.

When I held that water in my hands, my mother’s childhood and mine merged. Time ceased to be linear. The water in the bottle was the same water that had risen through roots, fallen as rain, flowed through springs—the same water that would one day rise again through my cypress. It came to me not as a symbolic nature made to kneel within the walls of civilization, but from inside the forest, untamed. It came with a silent promise that the world of my grandmother’s tales might still exist.

VI. Branches

I am not the first to notice these things. Every culture has stood at the meeting of water and tree and recognized something sacred. I feel the layers of ancient understandings in my cypress; superimposed, interwoven, like the rings in its trunk.

In the languages before ours, there were Hittites. They had a sacred tree they called Ewa. They placed stones beneath it, just as we still leave offerings at visitation trees today. The stones held the water’s prayer when the tree was not there.

Then came the Urartians. They carved stylized, symmetrical trees on their bronze belts—the oldest Trees of Life in Anatolia. The branches reached toward heaven, but the roots held the water. My mother weaves the same tree into her carpets. She has never seen an Urartian belt. But the tree remembers.

The Armenians know this, too. Before Christianity, they had sacred groves at Armavir—plane trees where gods were honored. Later, they carved stone crosses and placed them beneath trees near water. The cross, too, is a tree, and the tree, too, is watered. Pilgrims tied cloths to the branches. Just like us.

The Persians who ruled these lands also had a sacred tree. It is said that Zoroaster himself planted a cypress at Kashmar, grown from a branch brought from paradise—a cypress that lived over a thousand years. It drank from the same underground rivers that still flow. When I read this, I think of my own cypress.

In their cosmos, a mighty tree grows in the cosmic ocean, bearing the seeds of all plants. A fish swims around it, protecting it. The tree is the source of all life. The ocean is not around the tree; the ocean is in the tree, rising.

The Jews carry this too. In the Garden, the Tree of Life stood at the center. The burning bush that Moses saw—a tree that burned but was not consumed. Fire could not touch it, for water was its soul. Aaron’s staff that flowered overnight. The resurrection of dead wood. My fire-born tree.

In Kabbalah, the tree becomes a diagram of divine energy—its roots in the beyond, its branches in creation. The tree is a map of everything. And between roots and branches, what flows? Water. Always water.

The Galatians, ancestors of the Celts, brought their sacred oaks. They believed each tribe had a tree, and if the tree fell, the dynasty would fall. At sacred springs, they tied cloths to branches, leaving their illnesses there. The water washed them; the tree held them.

In Germanic lands, the linden stood at the village center: a place of justice and gathering. Under its branches, they made decisions that would shape lives, and the tree drank while they spoke. The tree as witness, as shelter.

In India, the Bodhi tree witnessed the Buddha’s enlightenment. Pilgrims still sit beneath its descendants, waiting for their own understanding. They wait for the moment when the mind becomes still as water, clear as water.

The shamans of Central Asia climb the World Tree, most often a birch. It grows from primeval waters; its roots drink the depths, its crown touches the sky. They climb through water to reach the gods. They tie cloths to its branches—the same cloths I have seen in my mother’s village.

The Greeks believed that at Dodona, Zeus spoke through the rustling of oak leaves. The leaves moved with the same breath that moves water. The plane tree of Hippocrates still stands on Kos. Dryads lived and died with their trees: their lives were water, their deaths were drought.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the cross is called “the blessed tree.” Mary is the rod of Jesse that blossomed. In Cappadocia, churches carved into rock stand beside living trees. Water dripping from the rock is holy; the tree that drinks it is holier still. The boundary blurs.

In China, water generates wood. Cosmic trees rise from cosmic waters. Jianmu, a ladder between heaven and earth at the center of the world. Every step on that ladder is a drop of water rising. Fusang rises from the eastern sea, where the suns are born. The peaches of immortality in the garden of the Queen Mother of the West are watered by celestial springs. Even immortality needs water.

The Taoist sage is like water: taking the lowest place, nourishing without effort. The tree is water’s risen form. Water does not strive; it simply rises, and the tree follows.

When I climbed the eucalyptus as a child, I did not know these things. Now I feel them: the water in my cypress is the same water the Hittites poured, the same water the Urartians carved on their belts, the same water the shamans passed through, the same water flowing past the Bodhi tree, the same water gathered under the linden. The same water that fell as rain on my mother’s village, that rose through the eucalyptus, that I now pour at the roots of my cypress.

All of them are here. In my cypress... In the seeds in my wallet. In the water, my mother brought in a plastic bottle. They do not cancel each other. The tree holds them all.

When I water my cypress, I am watering every tree that has ever been sacred. Every spring that has ever been visited. Every cloth that has ever been tied to a branch. Water does not ask which ancestor it came from. It does not distinguish between Hittite and Celt, between shaman and sage. It simply flows. And in flowing, it connects everything that has ever lived.

VII. Patterns

My mother weaves carpets. Everything I have tried to tell becomes visible there. The Tree of Life repeats: a central trunk, symmetrical branches, roots below, crown above. This is not decoration. It is the center of the world, in the room where the carpet lies. The center is where water rises.

Around the tree, most often, runs a zigzag line. The water paths. It flows around the tree, nourishing it and connecting it to everything. Sometimes it separates the garden from the wild. Sometimes it is simply the flow itself. Without this line, the tree is alone. With it, the tree is part of everything that flows.

Other motifs protect. Triangles against the evil eye. Complex patterns that confuse negative energy. This is knowledge: knowing that the world is not neutral. Weaving itself is a prayer. Every knot holds a wish; every thread carries water’s memory.

The wool comes from sheep my mother knows. The dyes come from plants she gathers. The plants grew because water found them. The colors come from the memory of her village, the mountain, the spring. Each carpet is a map of water, of memory, of survival.

VIII. Canopy

Every evening, when I open my hands on the balcony, I am not alone. The Hittite priest, the Urartian craftsman, Zoroaster’s cypress, the Armenian pilgrim, the Jewish mystic, the Galatian druid, those gathered under the linden, the silence beneath the Bodhi tree, the shaman, the stylite, the Chinese sage… All of them inhabit the invisible space around my cypress. All of them, watering with me.

The tree does not distinguish. It only drinks. It only grows. Even if burned, it greens again, because water remembers the way back.

What I have learned: the tree is water’s body. Water carries everything—prayer, grief, hope, ancestor. Water is the only substance that can hold all of this without becoming heavy.

My cypress is eight years old. It needs a forest. I am searching.

But perhaps the forest is already here. All the layers gathered around the same water. All of us. Every tree that has ever been watered is part of this forest. Every hand that has ever cupped water at a spring is here.

In China, they say water generates wood. I think of my eucalyptus. I think of my cypress. I think of all the trees that have ever held water, and all the water that has ever held memory. The covenant continues: water rises, tree grows, memory flows. It has always been this way. It will always be this way.

Water remembers. And it continues to flow.

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