The Wisdom of the Grandmother Tree

As I write this, I am looking out my window at the 158-year-old Maple tree that my little cottage is nestled under. I call this beloved tree the grandmother and in all the years we have lived together she breathes out oxygen, which I then breathe in. And then I breathe out carbon dioxide, which she takes in. That is the exquisite interconnectedness of life. Sometimes I sit quietly as we breathe together, and I let her in for she carries wisdom that most of us are cut off from.  

I also love to imagine what she has seen and experienced as her life unfolded. She was an infant when Lincoln became president, and she was here before cars, phones and electric lights. In all her life she has probably never experienced a 108° temperature like we had this summer, and she probably has not experienced multiple days where the air was dense with smoke particles.  

Something is happening on our planet that is so very scary. I invite you to come sit on the moon with me and see before you this beautiful blue-green-white jewel of a planet that is our home. Be stunned by her beauty but also see that her weather patterns are becoming deeply disturbed. Wild storms with high winds and torrential rains are becoming more intense and more frequent. Wildfires are exponentially increasing, burning not only homes and forests but also towns.  

If this makes your heart ache like it does mine, the question to ask yourself is, “How can I make a difference? How can my actions contribute to the healing of our planet rather than its devastation?” 

You probably won’t sign up to fight forest fires or become a scientist to try to help save our coastal cities. But there are many things that you can do. The most basic thing is to live simply. Recycle as much as you can. Buy used and make skillful decisions about your transportation. 

But even more importantly, cleanup your inner environment. All the greed, all the violence, all the unskillful actions on this planet come from minds that are disconnected from life. And most of us, most of the time are disconnected, lost in our thoughts, trying to do life rather than be life. But we don’t have to live this way, half alive, caught in our minds addiction to struggle. 

So give yourself the gift of the daily meditation practice. We need quiet for sanity, we need quiet to come back to ourselves. There are so many great apps now that can guide you if you’ve never done this before. Also bring the great healer of breathing practices into your life for they can calm what is agitated, opened what is closed and enliven what has become half alive inside of you. 

And something that is so very essential, and we have almost completely lost sight of it, is to spend time in nature every day. Because we live in such a fast-paced world that is lost in doing, doing, doing, always going somewhere else, it can be hard to settle down and just open to nature. If you find this difficult, close your eyes and focus on your out breath, letting it be long and slow and deep, then simply allowing your in breath.  

When you’ve calmed down a bit, put all your focus on listening. There are so many sounds dancing all around you and within you. It is the music of life, and it may include cars, airplanes and human voices, but also birds singing, the wind dancing through the trees and the sound of water. Don’t reach out.  Allow the sounds to come to you, as you listen to life expressing itself.   

Stay with this as long as it calls to you and then, when you open your eyes let life in. See, really see it as if you have never been on this planet before. You can do this for 10 seconds or 10 minutes. Don’t force it. Most of us have been far, far away from life for a long time. But this grounding and opening to life as it is can open your eyes to the absolute wonder, intelligence, and interconnectedness of all of life. And when you open to life in this way it becomes more and more impossible to act in any way that would harm our planet and all the beings that are part of her dance. 

It is time to fall in love with our planet again so you can become a part of the healing that it is crying for. I leave you with my favorite quote from Chief Sealth: 

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” 

If this post speaks to you, please consider checking out my radio show of the same title on Dreamvisions 7 Radio for the next two Thursdays at 5 AM & 5 PM PT or after that click Previous Episodes On Demand.