A Week to Revisit

Hello my beautiful readers! Thank you for coming to this site today and every Friday to read my posts. This week I’m reposting an old favorite titled Things I’ve Learned From the Trees. I’ve never reposted a blog before, so I’ll be transparent as to why I’m doing it now.

This week I traveled to Colorado to visit friends and family and ski until my legs fell off. And during this week I gave myself permission to fully break from all the obligations I manage on a weekly basis and just rest. This break meant that when 10pm Thursday night rolled around my ski bags were packed and my blog had been left unattended. In placing family over productivity something had to get cut and this week it was the blog. But more than that, I have come to value my writing practice, and the small community we are growing here, too much to fire off a lazy post. So for now I’ll leave you with a repost that I love and an image that I took while skiing with my parents this week. Next week I’ll be back with a new post and I hope you’ll be here to read it.

Things I’ve Learned From the Trees

When the world seems a dismal place, I like to think about what we can learn from the trees. The value of silently observing the world as it changes around you. The deep quiet of solitude, loneliness, the simple act of standing witness to the passage of time. Being committed to just one thing: growth. Living in a way that does good for the world; and knowing that even the sentinels of the forest are not without their flaws. For even the most resplendent tree casts a shadow upon the ground that keeps the ferns from growing.That it is impossible to live a life that is devoid of harming others, but, tandemly, simply because something is impossible doesn’t preclude it from being worthy of our attention, our efforts.

After all, it was impossible for man to reach beyond our little blue dot and sail to the mood. It was impossible right up to the moment that we decided to test our hypothesis of impossibility. In doing so we move the bar just that much further, set a new impossible, a vast horizon on which we can build and destroy dreams so grand, that from here, their greatness makes them all but invisible.

When I look at the world and see all the greed and indifference, the shame and confusion, I think of the trees. The old giants.

I like to imagine a stand of soaring pine trees which no man has ever seen. Trees that took root before this great democratic experiment, before you, before me, before anyone you’ve ever had the slightest possibility of knowing came into being. When I look at the trees, not the tame, domesticated blooms that adorn our city street and front lawns, but the wild ineffable misers who live out their lives – which are so inexpressibly different from our own –  away from the prying eyes of humans. When I think of these trees – it feels like the greatest form of hubris that we should endeavor to write our stories on their skin. 

These trees don’t strive to have their names written in the pages of our history books. Instead, they are the pages of our history books, the pages of nearly every human story, the true and the tabloid, the sweeping epic and the stereo installation manual. And if tomorrow, we are called upon by some desire within ourselves to cut these giants down; to bring their soaring-ever-reaching limbs crashing down to earth, they will not complain, but simply acquiesce to our desires and we will have lost something grand and powerful, and very nearly the closest thing we have on this planet to the divine. We will have lost a teacher.

For the trees know we are small confused mammals with minds that are smaller still. They accept us and our hubris, our carelessness, our ceaseless errors, knowing that these flaws are simply part of our DNA, and they forgive us. And in their silence they hold space for us to learn. To grow not as they do, but in our own way.

The trees teach us that there is an awesome power in growth, in being huge, fat, bursting in our liveliness, and that it does not do to make oneself small. Conversely, they also show us that the notions of who is better and best does nothing but divide us, and that living only to take is not only cruel, but so beyond pointless that only a silly little animal like a human would spend their one fleeting, glorious life in pursuit of this pyrrhic victory. 

I like to look to the trees, and know that one day, all of it, all of you, will be gone, as surely and completely as the silence that stood in your place before you arrived. And then what? Just the trees and the dirt will remain, until one day, they too are swallowed up by the gaping maw of space. And we are, all of us, returned to the star dust from which we came.