Conversations With a Tree

What a beautiful tree!

Beauty is for beginners. Beauty is all about coming home, nothing to do with shape. Beauty is found in the majesty of time.

Beauty needs us to be “other”.

We will never be other than you. We can blend with beauty, or disappear in it. It never separates between us.

The one that sees beauty is tracing the memories of home. The one that feels beauty is opening the longing in the loneliness to come home. The one that moves through beauty is on her way to the home of all creation.

So come! Why do you wait?

But I see you as separate.

Yes. That is just the start. Suddenly, we are noticed. These trees. These backdrops to harmony as you walk as if you lived in another dimension. But we are here. We are always here.

Often, you see us from the corner of your eye. We are noticed mostly by our absence. But we are here, a green and living part of every step you take, every breath in the night, every glimpse of the horizon. We don’t mind that we are unnoticed. We have the kind of mind that lives above choice – we hold you anyway.

When you do see us, you choose to choose between us. You are addicted to choosing. You choose by comparing, when in truth, there is no difference. You say “This tree is beautiful, this one not.” You make more and less and better and worse out of a unity which never can be broken.

Look deeper.

We are not separate from one another and nor are we separate from you. You simply forget us, just as easily as you forget yourselves.

But when we are forgotten, are we gone?

How are you not separate from a tiny tree on the other side of the world?

We are one through the earth and we are one through the air. We are one through the wind and one through the rain. More than this, we are one in that field which breathes it in – all that is; and we are one in the field that breaths it out. We are one in atmosphere and one in nourishment. As one, we witness, as one, we are seen. Also, we are one in mind.

 

How could you have a mind, let alone one mind?

How could you hear our answers if our mind was not the same as yours? You are listening to the undercurrents of your own mind, sweet face.

Is a tree thinking through one branch, leaf or ripening fruit or is it thinking through the whole of itself?

You can look to your brain for comfort – to reassure this belief in separation from us. But is not your brain composed of a billion trees, communicating according to need, sharing, absorbing, structuring and forming?

And your blood, how does it flow through your flesh, if not through networks of trees? Do you not feel how the heat of its mood changes?

How could we be different from the very forms of which you are made?

Still, you are here, on this country lane, with us. You are not on the other side of the world. You are growing in the climate here. There is a difference.

Do a billion perspectives on one tree divide it in its wholeness? Or is that one tree the very form which allows the billion perspectives? How could we have a point of view without a view? How could we choose anything if there were not choices existing to start with?

In these billion, changing perspectives, the wonder of beauty is singing a melody, only for you.

 

Are you really here? Or do we create you by seeing you?

And you, earth child, are you here?

If you close your eyes, are you still here? If you close your eyes, am I still here?

When the wind stops blowing through my leaves and branches, am I still here?

When the sun sets and no longer gives the compass of my yearning and the night falls, am I still here?

If children no longer stroked my bark or climbed my branches, am I still here?

If birds no longer entered my domain to build nests and nurture their young, or if they no longer took me as a podium for their evening melodies, am I still here?

If this cat, resting high up, on this branch, moved away to other spaces, am I still here?

And you. If you lose yourself in the wilderness of this world, forgetting we ever met, would I be lost in your losing?

I am here, just as you are here, sweet visitor. I am here, just as you are here, in the space between all trees, in the gap between one branch and another, in the silence that is found deep within the wind, in the depth of the earth, in each molecule of water and each mote of light. Here I am, just as here you are.

We are always here, always present, always now. But this is just the edge of the miracle.

Yet you still believe it is a dead thing, this life which is here. Where I feel fullness you find empty space. Where I drink the passion of life, you evade.

In this source of life and living, you are here, and here am I, whether we know it or not.

 

Can you see me?

I am always dissolved beyond the seeing.

To see you, I would be other than you. How could that be?

Yet you can see me seeing you – because you are the conscious one.

I am in your eyes, flowing through your body and mind, forming and reforming in the memory of being. This seeing is a transient and eternal moment saved through unity in the infinite ethos of trees.

Does the tree in you see the tree in me?

All ways.

To see one tree is to see all trees.

We are a template of life.

 

Who are you?

I am a mathematician. I connect the dots of creation, so that time and space take form.

 

Do you have feelings?

I feel what ‘is’, and what ‘is’ feels me. This makes no sense, says the mind. This feels right says the heart. This is known, say the bones.

I am what is, just as you are. How could we be other? There can be no separation, beyond this empty bark and this hollow trunk. Your words cannot separate us, because I am one with your words, my love. Your thought cannot divide us, because through me, your thoughts are formed.

Your witness is my witness and as one we witness it all. Can you let go and let the witness live through us as one?

And now, I feel a sadness, I feel two children playing a game of being lost while deeply knowing this game is sharply real.

How can you be at once so lost and yet so found? How can you move so far from the start, and yet never move at all?

They are afraid to know they are lost, these children of light, so they play. Yet they are already silently, secretly seeking a way home to the place they never really left.

It’s a feeling of soft longing and sharp lack, a dread of abandonment and lost hope. It’s listless yet still moves by inner knowing. It’s powerful, yet totally exposed. It believed the rupture of separation is disaster, it doesn’t trust yet that this rupture is the entrance to freedom.

I feel the strain of the seed shells waiting to split open. The strain of futile effort. Yes. Also this is here.

Are we resisting the breakage or seeking it? Pushing or pulling?

The sun is calling.