Hugged by trees

In perfection of harmony these old trees judge not.  Still and quiet and peaceful they stand, teaching one more lesson.

Their randomly tangled limbs, reaching this way and that, reveal life reaching, life reaching in every direction.

These limbs could be our lives, our lives every bit as crooked and tangled in their blind reaching for the Light.....but unlike our fading past and hidden future, in the trees’ branches that groping life-path is documented, each twist and change of direction and simultaneous growth in multiple directions all there to be seen, an entire life history sculpted through, and suspended in, thin air.

Might our lives not look similar could we see them in their entirety, from beginning to end, our growing roots reaching into the earth, our roots extending around the boulders and bedrock of constraints and barriers and setbacks, our roots extending into the world seeking sustenance in careers and crops and fights and victories and marriages and alliances, reaching for water and nutrients and money and security…..while growing in the other direction the branches of our soul twist this way and that in search of Light, our prayers and meditations, our pilgrimages and memberships, our faith and beliefs, reaching upward for warmth and energy and assurance and comfort.

In quiet dignity these trunks and branches glow in the morning light, munificently giving me their shade, while I breathe their oxygen.

We breathe together, quite literally, my exhaled carbon dioxide feeding these moments of their lives, their exhaled oxygen feeding the next moments of my life.

Such lessons they have gently taught me in such moments, revealing our kinship, softly lighting the limbs and branches of my life.

Only my preoccupation with time and schedule and endings and death keeps me from seeing the eternal to which they invite me.

Their life exists so fully present that their entire life history, every branch and limb and twig, stands visible before me, naked, fully vulnerable, and in the process, fully life-giving, harming none, providing homes and shelter and shade and oxygen.  It is a lofty goal to which to aspire, such presence, such life-giving presence.

Our senses, so narrowly constrained to the physical do not discern the breadth and depth of Life, nor even the extent of our own roots and branches.

If we could perceive beyond our senses, perceiving the roots and branches through which our lives grow, perhaps we would mourn less and grieve less, both because we would be less compelled to pursue our destructive tendencies, and because we would see that the growing branches of all life are never really severed or lost.

Such purity of growth in the tree, no plan, scheme, malice, or machinations, just fulfillment, living on light and air, water and earth, passively providing life-giving service to all who need it, accepting and growing within the circumstances provided.

Indeed, the tree is an embodiment of highest spiritual form. 

Miraculously it takes dirt and rock and water and therefrom erects towering structures into the sky.

All civilization hinges upon its miraculous wood, strong enough to support cathedrals, weak enough to easily cut, rigid enough for bridges and pliable enough for ships’ prows.

Without the axe handle, arrow shaft, walls, roofs, and wheel, we would not have the “civilization” for which we sacrifice so many forests.  A slight shift in any property of the tree’s wood---- its oxidation (burn) rate, hardness, tensile strength, decay rate, rupture modulus, or rigidity --- and we would have to be proclaiming our superiority and dominion over earth while huddled in the back of a dark, cold cave, tossing rocks at the approaching fangs and claws begging to differ with our self-proclaimed appellation “superior”.

We would do well to at least briefly reign in our rampant hubris and ego, and display some small modicum of uncharacteristic humility before the tree whose oxygen we breathe, and whose branching structure above and below ground would embrace and teach all willing to sit a while, be still, and immerse in timelessness.