an ode to trees

This blog was written to accompany a yoga class- you can access this yoga class here. Sign up for one month, three month, or monthly subscription. Class title is An Ode to Trees (Vrksasana).

Accompanying soundtrack by the lovely Julia Hass: https://soundcloud.com/julia-hass/she-is-a-tree

This week I am thinking about trees. Thanks to my brother, Conor, this summer I got to meet Hyperion, the tallest living thing on earth. She is buried in a secret grove of her very tall sisters in northern CA. I didn’t think it’d be such a big deal at first. After all, I am a California girl and I know and appreciate a good redwood when I see one, but come on, I see them all the time. I didn’t feel the difference until I got there. The air was different, the light was different, the way sound moved in the space was different. We whispered as intuition instructs one to do in a sacred place and among sacred things. All trees are sacred, but there was a sense of being among the elders there.
California is burning (again) and with it many trees. As I understand it, the redwoods have evolved to survive regular fires, developing thick outer bark that holds up even when the soft core wood burns, and dropping their lower limbs to avoid catching fire, but as humanity has suppressed the natural fires that once happened seasonally the price that is paid are these giant, super-hot super-fires that we are now experiencing, and the redwoods have not evolved to survive these kinds of fires.
An entirely different kind of tree but equally as majestic are the live oaks of New Orleans, spreading their roots and limbs as wide with just as much passion as the redwood puts into height. Far reaching canopies invite embrace and nestling in their broad, meandering arms. I am reading about these trees falling in hurricanes in the southeast now, too.
Yes yes you say, we can all wax poetic about a good tree, but what are trees really good for, I mean to me, as a human, you may ask. And I will skip past all the obvious low hanging fruit here (hah!)(air, shelter, food, etc) and say to you my friend, metaphor! Trees are fabulous metaphors. I have never come across a better metaphor to appreciate the value of being both rooted to the earth and reaching for the sky with equal determination and fervor. If we listen to ayurvedic wisdom, should we succumb to being too heavy, too rooted, we are in danger of inertia, lethargy, depression. Should we surrender to becoming too airy and light we are in danger of becoming anxious and flighty. A tree is the epitome of balance, between heaven and earth, or spirit and ground, or heavy and light, or however you choose to name that spectrum. It grows up and down and prepares to stand in some cases for centuries, while waving it’s hands in the air and moving with a fluidity and freedom enabled by it’s own stable base.
I have been reading The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, for the first time. At one point Shug says: “Yes, Celie…Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?” I also remember reading in an essay somewhere that a blind girl, on gaining sight for the first time in her life, was most surprised by the fact that humans did not resemble trees as much as she had thought. Without her sight she assumed we humans were basically walking trees, that was what her sensory information told her. Grounded when we can be, reaching for the sky, trying to find the healthy balance in between. Developing hard outer bark to protect our soft heartwood, sap hydrating and nourishing our bodies. Connected to all the trees around us and dependent on each other’s wellness and survival, as well as other species, to thrive.

“When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent… you sort of understand that it didnt get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you dont get all emotional about it. you just allow it. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. and you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgement mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”- Ram Dass

Amid the chaos of the present, amid the violence to bodies, human, animal, environmental that is occurring daily, the daily elevator ride to grief and to hope and back to confusion, I look to the tree.
And so I give you this class, inspired by the tree. May we root down to rise up.

My Cypress tree at the foot of an old growth redwood tree