Climbing Trees as an Act of Liberation

Friday, March 21, 2025

Climbing a tree is not merely to ascend a physical structure. It is an act of resistance. A reclamation of the body, of space, of freedom from linear expectations. It is a way of saying: I move because I can. I do not exist solely to be watched, weighed, or consumed.

Climbing a tree collapses hierarchy. There is no audience in the branches, no mirror held up by society to dictate whether your ascent is graceful, feminine, or useful. It is you, your limbs, the bark, the air. In that solitude, stripped of codes and gazes, a presence emerges—dense, autonomous, human. Not an object to be looked at, but a subject in full motion.

This movement is not performance; it is essence. It is not choreography but rhythm—your own, unmediated. In a tree, you are not framed, edited, or uploaded. You escape the spectacle. And perhaps that is what makes it radical: it is unprofitable to capitalism, unreadable to algorithmic logic, and ungraspable by those who seek to box you into a digestible archetype.

For a woman especially, to climb is to reject the narrative that your place is to sit still, be delicate, desirable, seen. The climb is dirty. Unapologetically so. Scraped knees and soil under fingernails become badges of return—to the earth, to wildness, to agency.

It echoes a deeper system of thought: that existence is not a path to be followed but a rhizome—interconnected, intuitive, spiraling out from a core self. Like the branches you climb, you move not in one direction, but outward, in all directions that feel right at once. To climb is to defy gravity, yes—but also lineage, normativity, objectification.

When you climb a tree, you become unreadable in the way that matters. You cannot be flattened into a trope. You disappear from the grid of expectation, and in doing so, you reappear to yourself more fully.

In a tree, you don’t owe beauty, explanation, or purpose.
You owe only truth—to your movement, your curiosity, your becoming.

So climb.
Not to be seen,
but to see.

Not to be admired,
but to remember:
You were never made to be static.