Posted on January 26, 2010 - by Rasham
Confessions of a Maybe Palm Tree
Confessions of a Maybe Palm Tree
I was on an early morning run heading west in pursuit of the edge of our east bay landscape, the Oakland waterfront. It was dark when I reached the docks, and I paused but never stopped breathing as I stood upon a wooden mound where I gently began to embrace the vacant space. I opened my heart with deliberate movements, siding with the ways of the world for once instead of posing a challenge. With my eyes I traced the vertical line of my arm extending towards the blinking lights of hovering planes, and in the stillness I watched a few seagulls become a hundred singing songbirds in the sky. I watched them manipulate the urban seascape, crouching in spaces that weren’t meant for their inhabitance: they had made a home there anyways. I turned my back to the sea and saw a row of tall trees, palm trees I think, though their manicured appearance obscured their actual identity.
It was early and no one was watching; sinking into the stereotype that has haunted me since I declared my intentions to grow long my leg hair I did what any hippie would do: I hugged one of those ‘palm’ trees. Both my arms were wrapped only slightly around its waist, and I waited for some shock or sequence of tremors that would signify an energy exchange, but all I experienced was myself hugging a tree, a tree that occupied the tiny cell it had been given, a prisoner anchored in tainted soil surrounded by pavement and mocked by all the tassels and frills of the Waterfront hotel. Looking around I saw that most of the urban setting resembled a prison, only, of course, from the perspective of everything non-human. The trees seemed forlorn and sad standing as though they’re energy had been arrested and publicly displayed for people’s twisted pleasures.
There is an undeniable element of control in our macro-world: we destroy nature and build in its place a space where we pick and choose what goes here or there, making orphans of earth’s offspring and adopting them as our pets, our accessories, our pleasure things.
And in becoming the stereotype I began to cry, my arms were now scratching the surface of mystery tree and I didn’t care if anyone was watching. And then it came, those precious words whose arrival I eagerly await usually while sitting with eyes closed in front of a candlelit Buddha were now caressing the icy moisture on my face. Maybe it was the tree, maybe it was the rain, maybe it was the lingering high from the toxic residues I inhaled working night shift behind the counter of a bleach-soaked café; whatever the inspiration, my mind was held by pure knowing and I was content.
This was the message received:
(in the voice of a tree; think ‘Treebeard’, Lord of the Rings):
“Though we may appear to be taken, though we have been brought here and cropped here, made to stand here and provide here, we are victims of nothing and prisoners of no one. What we have we share freely and that makes us free, free to stand where-so-ever our trunks are planted. Growth is not extending in the manner of the will; would I be any happier a tree if I existed in a forest? If instead of garbage and cement I saw wild things and living dirt? If I allowed such expectations to boil and coalesce then I would certainly be a bitter tree, for that is surely not my reality. But what is my freedom is my choice: I choose to be, to see growth as extending towards being, towards God, infinite and always: see you a roof limiting the height of my leaves? See you a bottom stunting the depth of my roots? See you anything but an open tree, available for you to experience, ever present and alive? My needs are supplied by factors unbounded by the human powers that have placed me here: rain will fall, air is all ways, and love is in the earth that feeds me. There is a beauty in every presence; I choose to show who I am; a happy tree, a tree that is free, a free form of beauty.”
“You, human child, are a tree. Some days you think of yourself a wilted stem in a broken pot, without proper water, suffocating and dry, hungry and dying. Other days your mind is aligned with the truth of your presence and you are as I, tall and free, the boundaries that once seemed to hold you dissolve in your own radiance and you are fearlessly love. Which do you choose to be, human child? Do you wish to grow outwards, expanding your selfish influences across shaky grounds, collecting and conserving for the benefit of your useless fears? Or will you choose to grow upwards and beyond what is shallow and immediately satiating, will you coil your roots down into the meaningful depths of understanding and will you reach your mind to occupy the space where thoughts are lit by the same force that awakened the stars? Will you cling to your greedy expectations or will you simply be? Life will not give you anything: what is meaningful are those lessons that awaken within you that which you already know. You are a tree as I am a human, the word is irrelevant and the form is no matter because the love is the same.”
And it was then that I accepted Tree as a profound teacher of historic wisdom, a living example of that which is known but forgotten and confused and complicated and overshadowed, that which has the power to restore and replenish our disconnect and our hurt: like a tree all we ever truly need to do in this world is breathe, and all we were ever truly meant for is being. There is no prison that can suppress higher potential that is outside the body of the bearer of destructive thought; change your mind and watch as the whole world becomes your best friend.
On my run home I saw nothing and everything and felt my heart and was alive in no need of anything but my own feet to run past the trees that stood like anointed professors in universal uniform presenting freely the greatest display of love.
It was later that day that I had two remarkable encounters with absolute strangers, or as I have come to understand the definition of stranger: brothers with whom I have only recently been reunited. One man guessed my birthday and guessed correctly, figuring that early morning was when I played in the waves of spiritual awareness. He also predicted that I am becoming a great Dancer: he spoke of these truths based purely on my energy.
The other thanked me for being so kind, for allowing him to see my spirit and for sharing with him a simple moment of softness.
I wasn’t trying to impress anyone; all I did was think of Tree that day, but the love was recognized, received, and reciprocated twice by two men who perhaps have themselves met Tree. In the hours to come I gratefully experienced a new channel of living; I changed my mind and discovered that life force flows when small things are done with great love, like, for instance, hugging a tree.