Day 44
Being in the tree (Luna) for 738 days, Julia Butterfly Hill had a realization.
““I realized nature was communicating to me. I started paying attention. I started listening and getting answers from everything—from Luna, the birds, the bears, the shapes of the pine needles. Everything became my teacher when I opened up. My relationship with Luna grew. I realized that Luna has been communicating with humankind for 1,000 years, and we just forgot how to listen. But I learned how to listen, and from that moment on everything started coming to me.”
Trees - Herman Hesse
(From the book: Wanderings - Hesse also wrote “Siddhartha which I count as one of the greatest books ever written. It is short and sweet, I highly recommend it)
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
Bodhi Tree
“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.”
Want to YOGAFY YOUR KIDS?
Join Ryan at 7:30am tomorrow, Sunday February 14th - big kids are welcome too!
Click the link below to join both Ryan’s KIDS CLASS + his Sunday Session: ONE LOVE! Please pass it on to your loved one!
Missed Ryan’s class yesterday or want to take it again?
Click below to replay until Sunday at midnight PST.
THE DIGITAL STUDIO CLASS SCHEDULE
Today, Saturday February 13th
9-9:30am PST In Conversation with Guest Bennie Fowler
12-1pm PST Spa Flow with Carolyn Budgell
4-5pm PST Vinyasa with Risto Duggan
6-7:15pm PST Yin with Malina Dawn
Tomorrow, Sunday February 14th
7:30-8am PST KIDS CLASS with RYAN LEIER (zoom link below)
8-9:30am PST Sunday Session: ONE LOVE with Ryan Leier
10-11am PST Vinyasa with Sarah Manwaring
12-1:15pm PST Vinyasa with Mari Dickey
6-7:15pm PST Active Yin with Risto Duggan