Writer, artist, director of theatre and film, anxty environmentalist and social engineer, Henrik Dahle is passionate about doing what he loves. Always on the case with a project and forever thinking up new ideas, he spends his days rewriting scripts, lugging art to galleries, scrawling poems on tiny pieces of paper, editing digital images and making stories with them. Top of his list of priorities is protecting the natural world, and making the most of his time in it. This is what inspired his recent personal challenge: to climb a tree every day for a year.
Tree 111. Bay Tree. Chiavari, Italy. I bloody love this tree. Such beautiful shapes of intricate interwoven curls, pulsing out from the centre to gather the light. Image credit: Jacob Parish.
“365 days is a long-haul project and there’s discipline involved. There’s a scale to it – you have to persevere,” Henrik says. “Trees are the greatest lungs of the world. The largest single offering from the Earth. We take them for granted. We appreciate them if we take notice. We explore them as children, our bodies remembering the primal experience of climbing. It’s why hands were invented.”
Henrik’s journey took him through ten different countries, and saw him meet everyone from belly dancers and actors to school children and professors. As well as taking photos from the trees he climbed, Henrik found himself conducting interviews among the branches and he is now writing a book to document his wild and wonderful escapades. We caught up with him to find out more about his life, loves and leafy adventures… ~ Rachel
1. How are you ‘doing what you love’?
First thing’s first – I looked up the word love to be certain that I am actually ‘doing what I love’. This might seem a bit odd because I’m 39 and I should know what love is by now, shouldn’t I? I’m someone who, since leaving school at 16, has pursued the precarious path of making ends meet with nothing but my bare art and ideas. As with most of us who invest in our untested creative inventions (that may never see the light of day) there is ‘money work’ to keep the ball rolling. There have also been choices to keep my overheads low, for example I converted and lived in a garage.
This is always a balancing act of buying myself time to get these things done, while trying to convince the world (and myself sometimes) of the value of my work. For me it is about manifesting my ideas and the excitement of seeing them come to life. I’ve also been driven by the fact that since we have to do something to get by, there’s a whole range of things I don’t want to do, (and I’ve already done many of those things to pay for ‘my time’).
Tree 112. Pine. Viareggio, Italy. I was high up and it was precarious. I was determined and I was scared.
I’ve also been lucky to find paid work that has supported my pursuits. For example, in my late teens I was a carpenter’s apprentice, which helped me to rebuild the garage I lived in and create customised frames when I was going all in for visual arts. It also taught me practical skills that helped me when I started in technical theatre, something that opened the door to a wealth of creative types, some of whom I subsequently collaborated with. The money work has increasingly blended with what I love, so that I can do just that, more of the time.
I think what I love is to think of things that inspire me – that I can see a point in doing – and making them real. In collaboration is good too. This is ultimately what I love and in this context, the dictionary tells me love is what I have ‘an affection for that gives me pleasure’. Perhaps it’s arrogance, or foolishness, or because I’ve got a brain with a kind of Tourette syndrome spluttering out ideas without asking for them – and I’m stubborn. One way or another, I can’t seem to help trying to make a fire from a few sparks. My current love is writing a book about a year I spent climbing and interviewing people up trees. My book, The Art of Climbing Trees, has partly been crowd funded, and so I have the faith or delusion of about 100 people to thank for making it possible. The informal economy with a social currency usually plays a big part in creating. I am grateful for all the support over the years.
2. What issues in life are at the top of your priory list?
I feel a sense of exhausting urgency that the planet is withering before our very eyes – at our hands. That species are being wiped out at 1,000 times the natural rate of extinction. This time round, we are the asteroid causing ‘the 6th mass extinction’ on Earth. The oceans, the soils and the atmosphere are filling up with our poisons and we are approaching a total toxic overload that our species will struggle to survive. A fictional substance called debt rules most of our decisions and just for example – causes death by malnutrition and starvation to the tune of 20,000 per day. Fictional borders and fictional laws have been created in the interests of a few to exploit the many and most of us do nothing, worse still, we support the structural violence by consuming its fruit – we create the fruit. It bemuses me on a daily basis that we carry on pretty much business usual.
It’s like a grand twisted performance in which we all suspend our disbelief under a spell of a false democracy, and the illusion that the leaders know what they are doing, or that they do it in our interest. I hope people find space between the stresses of maintaining an unmanageable modern life to actively engage with what’s going on ASAP. I hope we grow tired of consumerism and seek a richer way of living, and that the above fantasies are replaced by practical kindness and sensitivity to the whole biosphere, and all peoples. I just don’t think it’s that much to ask – that we protect and share this one and only home.
My main focus (as discovered during my year climbing trees) is being family in the widest possible sense of that word. We all grew out of that weird ancestor of ours – cyanobacteria. I’m not great at being family either. I need help too. I’m quite capable of letting my ego overshadow yours. I too need to wake up and take the action that the situation demands. There won’t be much love-doing at all if we carry on pretending the problems will go away by themselves.
3. Tell us about your background…
I’m one of an increasing number of transnationals with roots in more than one place – England and Norway. For me this translates to having two very different lives to contend with, including two different the languages. Divorce created the rift and cheap oil fuelled the possibility of shuffling back and forth across the North Sea for long holidays to see my dad when I was a child. A fairly bog standard safe urban thing in Southampton, UK, on the one hand, and a more outdoorsy, legging about in the forest, mountains, fishing, thing in Lillehammer, Norway, on the other. I am definitely one of the lucky ones on this globe, materially at least, however my life hasn’t been without fallout from the divorce-trafficking set up. I’m still fixing myself.
I was always a bit eccentric (possibly due to my transient start to life), and I’m told I was always clear about what I wanted (just bloody minded?). Some kind of talent for art was given praise fairly early on and the first thing I wanted to be ‘when I grow up’ was an artist. Later it was a film director, mainly I think, because I thought Steven Spielberg was cool and E.T made me wonder and cry.
I say life in Southampton was bog standard, but I was in fact lucky enough to be surrounded by inspiring people who opened my mind, and introduced my hands to different creative mediums. I was incredibly lucky to meet the right people at just the right formative moments. People like Ben Kenyon who, when I first met him, had an archaeological dig in his back garden and a mum who’d would show us mask making.
Me and Ben climbing the walls at my house in Southampton
Then there was also Equator Goldstein – who I had a massive crush on – who took me to a young filmmakers group, and whose mum, Gloria, showed me flat paper montage. They all made me feel part of the family. There was also my mum’s child psychologist partner, a Geordie with a kooky sense of humour and eyes like lamps, who wrote me puerile poems and inspired me to do the same. My siblings are on the list of prime inspirers, including my older brother who goaded me up a tree when I was three telling me that the tall people were coming after us. I can still remember how I imagined the ‘tall people’. And of course I’d be less than an inspiration without my parents. My dad is a brilliant heart medicine specialist, and my mum is a psychotherapist – both deal with hearts in very different ways. I mainly lived with my mum who I would call a citizen of the World. She will talk to anyone, and is always curious. The key thing is she tries to listen. We communicated and she was never patronising. I think she supportively watched to see ‘what I would do next’ rather than project too many of her ideas. She took me on Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (C.N.D.) demonstrations and she often went to Greenham Common herself, to monitor the movements of Nuclear weapons with the women’s movement there.
Me (R) and Ben (L) at Greenham Common
Memories of growing up are so diffused that it’s almost like I wasn’t there. Who was that person? How did he think? How does it all fit together? Just snap shots are left that float around in my head. It’s almost impossible to condense or pinpoint the many inspirations that created this version of a person that I am. Perhaps though, being given freedom, and being trusted enthusiastically, gave me the confidence to, for example, not continue to college after school and instead explore other routes to self-fulfilment and personal sustainability. This turned out to be setting up mini arts festivals when I was 18, going to college in my twenties to study community theatre, exhibiting my visual arts and making films, writing theatre, climbing trees and now, writing a book.
I sound like a rich kid, which in relative terms, I am. There’s an entry in my book about working class aristocrats and to some extent that’s how I see myself. The world is more oyster for us than for old time royalty, and it’s paid for with cheap energy (fuel and exploitation) and technology. Admittedly, these are the elements that enable a ‘poor’ man to set aside time for writing a book about climbing trees and changing the world.
For some reason I keep thinking of a cowboy in a western who dunked his head in a barrel of water to cool down.
4. What inspired your one-year tree climbing challenge?
There are always many nutrients that combine to weave forth an idea (who weaves something forth? Pretentious, but I like it). In the case of The Art of Climbing Trees though, there was the photo of climbers in a Giant Sequoia, and I was seized with the thought that ‘I want to do that’ – experience the presence of such an incredible beast. There was also the animated adaptation of the book The Man Who Planted Trees – about a solitary man who transforms an entire barren landscape by simply poking seeds into the ground for decades.
Tree 111. Bay. Chiavari, Italy. We watched a far right political rally with morbid curiosity in a square, and then I climbed this amazing tree. Image credit: Jacob Parish.
I’d been imagining the cover of a book where I was holding an acorn with the title I will climb this tree with the aim of doing exactly that, in the hope we’ll both be alive and strong enough for the collaboration when the time came. A seed is all about incredible potential. I suppose these elements had been mulching down in my head ready for a good seed to germinate there. Just days before the project began I ended up at a friend’s party where we played a game that involved retrieving a pirate hat from the branches of a tree. I got a real kick out of it – the physical nature of it, the danger and the challenge.
When I started out climbing trees, I had no idea it would absorb so much of my energy. I had no idea that five years later I’d still be working on the book.
Tree 109. Maple. Grindelwald, Switzerland, treated me to a lesson in my own arrogance.
5. A year is a long time. How did you keep your project interesting and what were the big highlights?
Yep. 365 days with no break, even from simply climbing trees, feels like a long time – especially in the middle of the Norwegian winter. A kind of neurosis set in: I was always looking out for ‘today’s tree’, for something new – whether that was the type of tree or the location, or some other interesting feature. I quickly realised that if this was going to be a book, then I need to open it up. Two weeks of climbing trees had passed and I invited my first guest to join me. It began with friends, and then I started emailing people who inspired me, like Rob Hopkins who co-founded the Transition movement.
Tree 131. Northern Red Oak. Me with Rob Hopkins up a tree in Totnes, Devon.
To justify the seemingly ‘frivolous’ personal journey to myself, and give it some weight, most conversations wandered into the territory of world change in some capacity. To satisfy my other creative urges I created games, left messages, made art and performed in trees.
One highlight was gathering 44 people from various picnics in the park, and all of us climbing a beautiful Beech together. The tree was packed with adults and children, including a woman, who was eight months pregnant, who sang Happy Birthday to a man who was celebrating his 40th birthday.
Tree 69. Beech.
There are so many beautiful memories from that year: discovering the numerous creatures that live in trees; discovering amazing trees; the conversations with over 80 people in trees; climbing in 10 different countries; the thrill of climbing in all weathers (even high winds), challenging myself to step out of my own comfort zones; and perhaps finding a bit more of myself too up there.
Tree 263. Birch. Lillehammer, Norway. Sometimes it feels incredibly precarious and at others, even at great height, it’s as if the tree is holding you. News media began showing interest in a 34-year-old climbing trees and this appeared in the local paper. Image Credit: Silje Rindal.
6. Which trees were your favourite to climb and why?
It’s hard to name a species. Each tree had it’s own puzzle challenge. I suppose though, all trees are equal, and some are more equal than others, so I admit that there were specific trees that stood out more than others. Like the Beech I climbed with 44 people (above), which gave me real joy. And the solitary tree in the spectacular Swiss Alps which gave me a powerful rush of adrenaline. The tree was growing out of a massive boulder and had a sheer drop on all sides.
Tree 110. Spruce. The solitary tree was crawling with ants and there were barely any branches to cling on to.
Then there was the tree in Southampton’s old graveyard that was an incredible squirming lump of wood with protruding tentacles, like an alien being. It forged a surreal staircase for me, leading up to above the crown where I sat as the sun went down.
Tree 143. Beech. At the top of the tall tree in Southampton’s old graveyard
There was also something extra special about climbing a tree with my family, as we attempted for tree number 365 at our family tree party.
Tree 365. Pine. Climbing a tree with my family in Lillehammer, Norway.
7. Why should we all get out and climb a tree every now and then and what top tips can you give us?
There were days during my project when I really couldn’t be bothered to haul myself outside and get into a tree, but there wasn’t once I regretted it. Some people believe trees earth your negative energy; that different trees offer a variety of benefits to us. Perhaps it was just a case of moving my body, or engaging my mind to think differently, but something would happen when I climbed. I found peace.
When you climb a tree you are directly interacting with nature. You lift off the ground and you’re immediately in another realm. It’s been proven that even just seeing nature can help the sick heal more quickly. Look at your veins, or the structure of your neural network, or the way your muscles grow, it is ordered chaos, as is that nature out there. Our eyes have looked on that nature for millions of years. Natural patterns resonate with us deeply. You look at nature and you’re looking at your home. You’re looking at yourself. So long as you go up and come down in one piece you’ll feel better for it, for all kinds of reasons.
The best advice I can offer is to keep your wits about you. Do a quick visual and stress test of a branch with your hand or foot before giving it your weight. Always have one hand or elbow holding or hooking something. Be extra careful when the tree is wet. Wear goggles or a head torch if you climb at night. Choose the tree that suits your confidence. Be brave and go for it – you are a monkey.
8. How has your UpTrees challenge changed your life?
Really, setting off on this tree project has been like stepping into a wormhole for the soul. It’s been a transformative, – both my dalliance with trees and the process of condensing the huge amount of material I collected into something readable. I’ve just spent a year on the first rough draft of the book, and that took me away on another quieter adventure.
I found the busyness of London incompatible with writing. I needed stillness, so I retreated to a cabin in Norway, and to a community in South West England. Now, after narrowing my gaze and contracting the external inputs somewhat, I feel more whole (and also slightly cleverer). I am both more despairing of our global situation, now that I’ve studied it more carefully for the book, and equally growing in strength and ideas to challenge ‘Goliath’. I’m currently working on playful ideas for performances like the Gauntlett Institute’s Professor Gauntlett and, more serious, working with the Albert Einstein Institution’s 198 methods of non-violent action, to encourage us all to engage with what’s going on and actually create the world we all deserve, where we can all do what we love. Both of these ideas and many others were born out of the tree project.
9. Describe a typical day in your life…
Usually, I wake up slowly with coffee. I might tidy something. Like bread my brain takes time to rise after waking. After pottering I get down to Filming. Editing. Something, what ever I’m working on – it’s often computer based at the moment. Today it’s writing. And emails, – there are always emails and floods of petitions to sign aren’t there? Today is slightly different though. Petitions I signed, and campaigns I follow come back with incredible news of surprising breakthroughs. I mean actually meaningful changes to policy and leadership that will affect billions of people. Wi-wa-wu-wa! I have to read the messages over and over again. I have to check the newspapers, call a few friends to understand what has just happened. It actually seems that for the first time in my life we might be beginning to win. It’s as if the good news are dominoes where by anything now seems possible.
Then I take a break to do something physical – make something, chop wood, build a shelf or a thing, or go for a walk, something to alter my headspace and get my blood flowing again. (Why I don’t just go and party after the morning’s amazing news I don’t know, but anyway…). I meet a friend and we have an inspiring catch up. We agree to collaborate, to get in on shifting the paradigm as it begins to creak out its long time position. Great! Then back to my screen. I actually finish The Art of Climbing Trees and send it to a publisher. I eat ridiculously food with people I love, we execute one of the 198 non-violent actions and then go dancing to excellent live music. The whole world is buzzing on some kind of bizarre high. Then I get in a space ship and explore the cosmos (literally) with my girlfriend. Nice. (In the real world I don’t have a spaceship or a girl friend. In the real world I just woke up in the sofa where I was writing, with dribble running down my chin… and a new idea).
10. What does freedom mean to you?
Jeez. Where to start? Freedom to be yourself, freedom to experiment, to believe, to think, to speak or ask questions with out ridicule. I think these freedoms begin with greater freedom of our space and our time*. In the documentary Garbage Warrior, architect Michael Reynolds describes the first time he designed a house that never needed fuel for heating. A house that collected the water he needed, and provided space for growing food. He said he suddenly realised and proclaimed with a big smile: “I am freeeee”. A mortgage, the fuel bills, council taxes etc., are an unrelenting constant pressure. Rising house and energy prices are beginning to highlight this constant drain on our lives.
Human beings didn’t evolve with that kind of demand on our mind-set. People more connected to the land live in rhythm with the seasons. Work is carried out in cycles. Your roof might need fixing so you climb up and fix it. The crops might fail, or the wildebeest might be late arriving, so you have to figure it out, and those are isolated and potentially mortal pressures. Despite the precarity of that life, it’s been said in this ‘civilised society’ we work longer hours now than we ever did, and continuously throughout the year. We don’t have time to explore ourselves, to let our minds wander, to imagine new possibilities and make better choices for the world. (The New Economics Foundation has presented a study to show how a three-day working week would in fact deliver a much higher quality of life). This is about freedom for time and freedom in space. We have no time for each other and our children when we have to chase the fodder for hungry debts, that we are ‘forced’ to acquire in this version of society. Debt is a bottomless pit and we all madly try to fill it. Much of this energy we’re required to present for our shelter is based on the audacious idea of land ownership. I mean, someone just claimed the land at some point and here we are beholden to that legacy. This is where I have to say I’m not a communist, but to me the current system feels like a scam. If we want freedom then a paradigm shift on the demands for our energy is required.
I’m not saying this society is all bad. Who can argue with a smoothie machine or heart transplant knowhow? I’m just imagining that we can have both more time and somewhere nice to live, that doesn’t cost the Earth and our souls. I like the word both. There are enough of us to do the necessary jobs, surely? If we cut out half the crap, 7 billion people can share the essential load and free up time for doing what we love.
It’s also interesting to me that the Reindeer in Sami captivity will live up to eight years longer than in the wild. I’m not decided on what I would prefer.
*In terms of relationships – there may be no such thing as true freedom. Relationships usually require compromise. In fact, curbing our desires is an essential part of living in harmony in general. I might want to spray that Monsanto pesticide and earn a ton of cash, but for the sake of harmony with the biosphere, I can’t. Until we align our desires with love for each other and the world, there’s no such thing as freedom. Are freedom and a sense of responsibility compatible? Discuss.
11. Where do all your creative ideas come from and how you decide which ones to do, and which to ditch?
My brain joins dots without me asking it to. My close friends have heard me say ‘I just had an idea’, a lot. Don’t know. Anything can trigger an idea – the starting point is obviously the world and everything in it. We all stand on giant’s and Hobbit’s shoulders. I’m getting better at not starting new things before I finish the last one but it’s still a problem. I have unsold or unfinished scripts, art, poems, websites, films etc. I’m the tenacious gardener: I’ll plant a tree, tend to it, plant another one, and another and then come back to the first one a year later. The trouble is I’m easily inspired. I sometimes imagine that one day all my trees will come into fruit at once and I’ll be gorging on the fun of it (or stressed out trying to pick and preserve and share it all).
There was a time years ago when I stopped trying to be a poet. I had to lose one of my interests and free up energy for others. There are only so many hours in a day apparently. I realised poetry was most likely a dead end for me; you either had to be brilliant, or brilliant and dead to make any money. It still creeps into my other work though. Nothing is wasted.
The good thing about giving a stuff about stuff is that projects with no contribution to the solution are quickly weeded out. There’s no time to lose on empty stocking fillers.
12. What personal experiences or people have been your biggest teachers in life so far?
Apart from the headline people I mentioned above, I should probably acknowledge a long stint as a… drum roll: a born again Christian. For good and ill, those years shaped me as I tried to figure out what God wanted from me, or didn’t want from me, experienced life as us (Christians) and them (non Christians), and negotiated sex with guilt thrown in etc., but also practiced love, forgiveness, humility, and was exposed to a world beyond the material.
After cutting-lose from that, there was the film An Inconvenient Truth that sparked a new focus – the Planet. That film kick-started all this. I got worried.
I made the strange decision not to read much as a teenager, so as not to be influenced. I wanted to discover my own voice. Genius or utterly stupid? I’m inclined to lean towards the latter. A good book usually expands my mind – blows it. Isn’t a big part of this journey about expanding our consciousness?
Tree 74. Oak. Hailes, Gloucestershire, UK. I was the tree. Image Credit: Phine Dahle.
13. What is the key is to following and fulfilling a passion and ultimately ‘doing what you love’?
I’ve just got to want to see that thing I imagined become real. Maybe I enjoy or need the process of making like it’s a meditation. I’ve got to set aside fears of failure. I might need to be willing to give up some other kind of status, financial security, or take a lot of time to do it, which requires marathon style dedication, and long term belief in the initial idea. If the idea is good it can weather periods of doubt, although doubt also needs working through. Like beating metal, an idea sometimes needs beating, and it’s hard work. Suddenly after working it the thing takes a desirable shape again that reignites the inspiration. I’m also a believer in letting work fallow, stepping back and letting my brain reboot and gather a fresh perspective, sometimes for months.
I don’t own a house, or have a great credit rating, but I do have masses of work that I produced because I wanted to, and I’ve chosen this life. I’ve done most of it on my own terms.
I appreciate being able to call my phone company and have my questions answered, but no one should have to work in a call centre five days a week. I want a world where everyone does some hours of the less inspiring jobs, and everyone gets to do what they love. As I keep saying, it comes back to the way society is set up. Pow.
Tree 275. Magnolia. Oslo Botanical Garden, Norway. Laila Folde had played this game in the 1970’s when she was a ‘radical’ who her parents disapproved of. Now she works for the education trade union and she educated me about it in this tree.
14. What’s the big dream for you personally? And for the world?
I believe in an ‘achievable Utopia’ – if we want it. People make fun of you if you have that kind of dream, but I ask, are we really going to settle for this mediocrity? People say ‘it isn’t that simple’. Really? No matter how complicated though, we simply have to work it out. We can do anything if we focus on it with logic and compassion and creativity. Come on people! What are we aiming for while we go about our work and daily routines? Aren’t we, like every one of our ancestors hoping that our DNA will flourish for thousands of years to come in the shape of glorious and contented human beings? When it comes to being alive here in this trampled garden we should be aiming high. There’s no second chance and all that.
I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I will never see the Earth in all its glory. I have been born into a degraded biosphere, but it would be enough for me to see the beginnings of real and meaningful change. I realise we are a traumatised bunch, and even if we achieved economic equality overnight, there would still be trouble for decades to come. This is at least a 200-year project. 700 if we include rain forest restoration. 100,000 years if we include the safe radioactive decay of 300,000 tons of our nuclear waste.
My dream for the world is beginning down the path of ‘redemption’. That we begin by returning the stolen land and waters to rejuvenate, that we remove the blockages to achieving these aims – namely, and broadly speaking, structural violence. Most people (and the other creatures) on the planet can’t do what they love. There simply isn’t the leeway in their survival schedule. Let’s do something about it.
For me, I’m growing less enamoured with what our western society offers, and I’m increasingly drawn to retreat from it, to look for alternatives. I want a roof over my head in a beautiful place alongside inspiring people. I want to be free from convincing people of my worth, from wringing out my life for basic needs to service the luxuries of others, from destroying the planet with every supermarket visit, etc. I want a clean conscience, and I want to be a part of creating something fabulous by doing what I love, rather than being part of something hopeless by doing a lot of meaningless jobs. I’m just one little bod who hasn’t given up on big ideas, and thankfully ‘I’m not the only one’.
Tree 345. Sugar Maple. Torshovdalen, Oslo, Norway. With plumes of alluring scent, and sweet flowers for fancy dress, The cunning trees seduce the airborne agents of their covert sexual congress.
It’s still possible to preorder a copy of the book or support the project. Find more information at www.uptrees.net. You can also connect with Henrik on Twitter: @uptreeslog
