Tree Talk

If wisdom is a quality that grows with age, then it is to the venerable grandfathers of the forest that we should turn to gain perspective on our fleetingly short lives. Rooted in the earth with an unquenchable affinity for the sun, they are models of our own path of integration of the physical and spiritual life.

Perseverance

 Living on the edge.  
 On the edge of survival, 
 bent and broken by ice and wind,
 bark polished by the driving snow,
 a vision of perseverance,
 each broken branch documented by another bend in your trunk,
 the will to live on echoed in the new growth each spring
 funneling life into the one remaining branch.  
 Not constrained by the need to grow straight or tall.
 Only impelled to survive and even prosper in this harsh world
 you have been offered by some bird dropping a seed on a ridge top 

As I bow and bend to life’s burdens both real and imagined, 
 I remember to look at the distant unmoving mountains,
 shimmering in the light,
 a beacon to take a step backward into spaciousness.
 I feel the beauty of my joys and sorrows, 
 my life and the end of   my life,
 blending into a rich soup, 
 inseparable, inescapable, beyond understanding.
 The only imperative is to grow new leaves each spring 
 to worship the sun,
 To explore each crack in the rock with a feeder root 
to stay connected with what is real.   

Madrone

How Do We Live?

I went for a walk in the forest near my home, seeking silence, seeking guidance as to my role in these times.  I came upon a recently active logging road.  Bulldozed trees, stumps and debris cluttered the eroding banks of the new road.  My heart contracted I pain at the ugliness, the senseless desecration of what was once so beautiful.  I stopped to talk to a magnificent Ponderosa Pine living within inches of the logging road.  “How do you live here so close to the threat of death?”

Ponderosa  – Reach for the sky, for the sun,  Feel the breath of the earth caressing your needles as it inhales and exhales, bow to the wind.  Sway gently, gracefully as it passes by.  Feel the tension and relaxation in your roots at each bow helping them to stay supple and absorb nourishment from the earth.  All else is purely imagination.  The past and future only exist in your mind.  There is no benefit in worrying about the future.  We will all die.  Our task is to live.  To live fully your heart must be open to each moment.  It cannot stay open when you live in live in fear.  We all must live beyond fear.  We must live in continual praise of what is.

Forest Wisdom

Later I came to a fir tree deep in the untouched forest.  “Fir tree you are connected with the earth and with the heaven.  With your wisdom tell me about the current virus affecting humans.  Does it have a purpose?  Is it part of a plan?”

Grandfather Fir Tree.  – You don’t need to make up stories.  In the normal way that you humans think, you have to imagine a cause, an intelligence that somehow designed this event to correct a problem.  You take it personally as if everything centers around you.   It is much simpler than that.  There have always been viruses there always been plagues.  We trees face the same issues.  When there are too many of us, the pine bark beetle sucks the life out of us, or a fire roars through clearing the forest.  It is not personal, as if some intelligent force makes a decision to clear the forest.  It is just the nature of things, certain conditions become ripe for a new response from the world or other creatures.  If you want to think of it in terms of intelligence, think of a divine intelligence as diffused though every bit of creation, every rock, every animal.  There is not central planning agency.  The human forest has become overcrowded and many people are not healthy due to pollution and lifestyle.  Those conditions create fertile ground for a virus or other pandemics.   It is not more complicated than that.  It is not about vengeance; not about some force actively creating a virus to teach humans a lesson.  It just happens.  It is a natural balancing, totally impersonal.  And there will be more.  You live in a world that is out of balance.  It is a world of you own creation from your mind, divorced from the heart, divorced from instinct.  And there is no blame; it is not your fault.  The prime motivator of your species is to propagate and survive just like we trees.  So there needs to be a constant thinning process.  For us it is bugs and lightening, virus and war seems to work for you humans. 

Is there an alternative? Can we evolve past that stage?

No. That is hardwired. You can never evolve past the need to survive or else you would die off.  But you can learn to control it. You can create a culture that consciously regulates that desire and integrates it with the needs of the rest of the world.  That is your task, that is essential if you are going to survive. 

What would that look like?

There are no models.  Some aboriginal tribes achieved it to a degree, but they also had a different world to live in, and in many cases the tribe survived by raiding other tribes for food, slaves or land.  So population never became an issue. I cannot tell you what it would look like, but I can communicate what it would feel like by letting you fee a profound connection with the earth, the sky, the water and the trees.  Let yourself feel like a blade of grass or a tiny mushroom, just living off the fruits of the land, the water and the sun, taking only what you need and giving back more than you take, so that each of you nourishes each other and the rest of us.  I don’t know what that would look like politically or technologically because it cannot be done by those means.  It can only happen through a metamorphosis of human consciousness. Perhaps in emerging from a crisis, perhaps from long struggle, I don’t know.  What is clear is time is precious, these moments are precious, use them wisely.