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13 december 2021 dear reader, the season is upon us: That time of year we are invited to bring trees into our homes. It is a ritual I returned to late in life, but am grateful to embrace again.
For almost 22 years, I did not have a tree. An agreement I made, one I came to regret, to become an indelible stain upon my marriage.
There was the time I joked about buying a tree and leaving it strapped atop my Volvo station wagon for the entirety of the December…
Of course, that wasn't the point. For myself, having a tree had nothing to do with religion, rather it is a way to commune and communicate with nature “because every tree offers us a wordless sensory experience, a connection that unites human bodies and consciousness to plants' inner worlds.”
stories of self past pressed, and present
The experience is reward enough.
Every time I encounter my tree, I inhale deeply to remind myself of the many ways we bring trees into our homes and of the ways we equally live in the forests of ourselves. I see it on my winter walks, too. Daily circles of reflection I return, to consider the many ways if my life were a song, I have always taken the long way around and slowly found my way home: to what I am rooted to what I return to what greets me in the constancy of change Naturalist Anna Botsford Comstock (1854-1930) observed that winter is the best time for learning to tell trees apart from each other. How to discern, and inevitably fall in love with, different species. As I look skyward, I am in awe of the skeletal elegance of trees stripped bare yet their branches still soar skywards like fragile lungs.
to fall in love
to inhale all that is my life
If we are born wonder-stricken by the glory of nature ~ it can only be so, for we ourselves are living wonders, sentient somethings against the staggering odds of nothingness ~ and yet we so readily relinquish this natural bond at the altar of a culture that tells us what it means to grow up. This loss might be our great primal wound. Maria Popova
But we have the choice. We can apply a salve.
We can bring a tree into our home.
Even if just for a few weeks.
to what do you return and what do you release? what are the blessings and the burdens that you carry? These are the questions we shall consider in tonight’s writing circle: the dance between purusha & prakriti I hope to see you there. In the busyness of the season, may you find the time to experience your wonder, to set your intention and gather in grace. looking forward to the many ways we can practice together xosew
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