One of my favorite magnolia trees in Richmond was cut down recently. She was an awe-inspiring momma of a tree – larger than the house she sheltered. Her canopy spanned the whole front yard and covered part of the roof. She lived on my street. When I asked a little girl playing on the fresh magnolia sawdust if the tree had been sick, she replied, “No, just old.”
This weekend a friend and I went for a walk through Hollywood Cemetery. Normally, as I amble past the markers of people’s lives, I’m observing dates and calculating the lengths of lives lived. On Saturday, however, the trees consumed my attention – especially the enormous oaks with roots visibly growing out of the stone embankments of the cemetery.
I love that trees in winter, especially these grand old trees, feel no need to prove themselves. “Here I am” they seem to say, “naked, proud, and knowing.” Through them, I learn to trust nature’s cycle – even when they look dead, life is simply resting inside, waiting to reemerge.
A teacher once told me that the yoga involved in tree pose isn’t necessarily about holding perfect balance. Instead, it is about getting back in the posture with grace, patience and commitment, each time I fall out.
On occasion in my coaching and women’s circle, I ask participants to practice grounding and taking up their rightful space in this world by embodying their favorite tree. They usually look at me a bit sideways. After some gentle coaxing, they set their skepticism aside that this could be at all illuminating. I ask them to feel their roots growing deep into the Earth and their branches reaching wide open, sky high or perhaps, in the case of willow, draping gently and gorgeously. “Breathe as your tree, let the wind and weather move you, feel your strength and your beauty.” Sometimes it works for them in the moment, sometimes not. It always works for me. Becoming a live oak centers me, calms me, and opens my heart.
In the brochure “The Method of Centering Prayer: The Prayer of Consent“, Thomas Keating writes, “The principal fruits of centering prayer are experienced in daily life and not during the prayer period.” I hope that even if women feel a bit silly and self-conscious embodying a tree for three minutes, the effect is felt out in the world – in them and by others. I hope they are reminded of their own dignity, especially in the presence of “their” tree.
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Tags: a woman's body, centering prayer, embodiment, Thomas Keating, trees
March 16, 2010 at 4:21 am |
My favorite tree is a gnarled, humongous tree maintaining it’s grip on the world at a 45 degree angle. It seems as though it will fall over any day and, if so, there will be a huge crash and many tears in the forest because this tree is BIG. But it doesn’t. Year after year it’s just there – impossibly angled in it’s not-perfect glory. It doesn’t care.
OK…I just thought of another favorite. A huge tree that I see every morning outside my bedroom window (hmmm….I don;t know what type it is). i like to watch it change through the seasons and times of day. The light is on it now, bringing out the reds and tans and then, later, gone as the sun sets behind the house and softens the trunk, branches and bark.
March 16, 2010 at 3:32 pm |
Lyssa – That’s so beautiful! I want to see those trees! I feel like I have from your description.
March 16, 2010 at 12:40 pm |
Can my favorite “tree” be a bush? If so, I LOVE forsythia, and if I had to be a tree/bush, I’d be forsythia. But NOT the kind that gets cut back, shaped into a perfect little bush. That’s just wrong, and I cringe when I see it. That’s not the nature of forsythia! Forsythia’s wily shoots take up lots of space. She needs to be planted in a place where she can expand fully into herself. She does this with reckless abandon and no apologies –then she dances in the breeze. She even sends out abundant yellow flares as if to caution people from trying to tame her and at the same time teasing them with her beauty and good fortune. Even her name — For-SYTH-ia — is fun to say.
March 16, 2010 at 3:35 pm |
Stephanie – This is so funny and passionate. I can so feel you as a forSYTHia – no taming!
March 16, 2010 at 3:42 pm |
Hello Eleanor, Loved your newsletter re trees. Next to humans (and perhaps my own pets, sweet kitties and a dog or two) trees are the most remarkable living beings! My all-time favorite tree is one I’ve seen only in passing, but I’ve passed it many times, on the way from Virginia to Georgia and back. A massive Black Oak, growing in Georgia, in the I85 median just over the Ga./S.C. line, it seems to wave at me, to acknowledge that I send love its way each time I see it. It gives me comfort to know it will still be there, anchoring the earth, long after I’m gone. Blessings on those who preserved this beautiful tree while they were building the highway!
Second favorite tree is a huge, old Live Oak in the yard next to mine in the Gulf Coast Alabama area. I remember it vividly and hope it lives to spread its limbs both high and low for many generations of children to come, to climb on and be happy in. In its honor I planted a small Live Oak in my side yard in coastal Virginia last year, and take pleasure in imagining it growing to be as big, old and magnificent as the one I left in my neighbor’s yard in Alabama!
Keep up the good work!