Trees- a stream of consciousness

 

It’s so quiet, so still.

It’s depressing to consider how long it may be before I speak or hear another human voice.

Alone, why?

And why am I so terrified to consider being alone?

What’s so horrible about it?

Lord knows I’ve been alone most of my life.

These trees don’t speak or communicate with each other and they seem to be doing just fine.

But we’re more advanced, so much more evolved, better than these trees.

Are we?

It feels so arrogant, so full of hubris and hot-aired arrogance to think that we’re so much better or have progressed beyond so many life forms here on earth or elsewhere. Wouldn’t it be the ultimate irony if the progression of evolution was the other way around?

Ironic to discover that we are the ancestors, the predecessors, the less-evolved or lesser of the species that now inhabit the earth.

We’re the dinosaurs and the amoebas and, in contrast, the whales and trees are our children.

Preposterous?

Let’s compare—

Humans are mobile, trees are stationary. Yet which is the more advanced?

To move and never settle in one place or to “put down roots”?

Isn’t that the lament of so many people nowadays? Just wanting somewhere, geographically or metaphorically, to put down some roots and grow? To have roots, a place to call home, etc. 

Aren’t we just envying the trees?

And are the trees as stationary as humans believe?

How can a tree possibly travel?

By allowing a seed, a part of itself to detach from the source and flutter away. The seed then travels to discover new places, new things. If the seed wants to stay and the earth wants it too, then it becomes absorbed, planted, puts down roots and grows and flourishes and discovers what it’s like to be there; a new place and time. And if it doesn’t want to stay or grow or flourish in this new place it’s discovered, then it will either fly away to another place or simply die.

Does the tree, the source, benefit from one seed’s growth or, rather, suffer because of the loss of the seed?

The tree never suffers from letting go. The tree benefits- for whether the seed that has separated or departed, has lived or died, either way the tree has experienced being somewhere else. It travels, is mobile. 

By letting go, yielding a part of itself with that which is outside of itself, the earth, the tree has lost nothing of itself in the sharing.