Tree of Life Meditation

Often we experience only a part of all that we are and we forget our wholeness and our deep involvement with the rest of creation. Whenever my people have turned to you, you have shown us the many different facets of our being. This is why the Old People called you a doorway to our extended being, a doorway to different dimensions, a doorway to the Otherworld. Your whole being is a lesson in cosmic awareness. Your branches and roots formed our ancient map of the cosmos in which all things are interwoven and interconnected.

Half of you reaches up to the light, the sky and all the space beyond. The other half roots deep into the dark soil.
The shoot from every germinating seed grows in two directions: one responds to gravity and grows down to its center, the other reaches up to infinity. I can feel the same pull in my own body. From the womb-space (or the corresponding place in a male body) downwards my body seeks the security of solid ground. From the womb-space upwards it likes to extend, so my spine can elongate and renew its elasticity and youth in daily cycles. 

With your roots, trunk and crown you make a vortex of energy, which continually exchanges energy between these two worlds. The way your crown and roots feed and mirror each other is like the way my own outer and inner worlds nourish and reflect each other ....
All things are ultimately made of vibrations, of music.
You are a dual consciousness harmonizing ....

Your trunk and all your woody limbs connect these two worlds and they remind me of my own mortal body holding my mind and spirit. Just as you grow on Earth as a trinity of crown, trunk and roots, so is my own union with Divinity a threefold connection of body, mind and spirit. If your roots and crown find the right conditions, you flourish and if either roots, trunk or branches are damaged, it affects your growth. If both my inner and outer worlds can flourish, they benefit each other reciprocally too and I will bloom again and again. And if either my body, mind or spirit are damaged, I too lose vitality.

At the end of the season, when you have come to fruition, you often display one last fiery blaze of mature autumn beauty before you withdraw from outward life into the hidden world of the soil, as I will repose in my soul at the end of the season. All that falls shall rise again. All that dies is born again. 
I learn from you that Nature never wastes anything, it recycles everything. This is a great consolation to me when I feel small and mortal or when I'm grieving for my loved ones and also for many unknown people I see dying on television.

You are my teacher and my model for the emergence of the visible out of the invisible, a new tree appearing from a seed fed by the air and light and invisible roots. It makes me realise that living things, which seem to come from nowhere are a pattern of connections and liaisons.
You also show me the emergence of multiplicity (branches, twigs, and leaves) out of unity (the trunk). And of course its complement: You are a living illustration how many individual entities cooperate to feed the one great being. All your leaves and all your rootlets, all your cells contribute to the great vortex of energy which your tree body is.
Similarly the Forest shows me how many tree-beings work in unity to clean the air, attract the water, stop erosion, mine the minerals, drop your leaves to form the soil and all other things you do to enhance life and beauty.

Your vortex-like being, that connects different worlds, where multiplicity creates unity and unity creates multiplicity is a key archetypal map which has helped us see that the same energy patterns everywhere in life and the Universe. It is there in the Water cycle of oceans, clouds, rain and rivers returning back to the sea. It is there in the design of our nervous and circulatory systems and in bio feedback systems.  We would be wise to base our consumerist patterns and energy production on your sustainable vortex pattern rather than on our capitalistic linear pattern, which leads to nowhere but destruction.

Another one of your endless teaching stories is told in your complete connectedness with your surroundings. You feed with the help of fungi from the nutrients in the soil. You drink water which was once oceans, clouds and underground streams. Your leaves feed on sunlight and carbon dioxide. In return you breathe out oxygen and water-vapor. You need a multitude of creatures and forces around you to flourish. The birds, the wind and the water spread your seeds. The insects and the wind pollinate your flowers. Many different creatures break down your fallen leaves and convert them into fertile topsoil It is impossible for you to flourish in a vacuum. You need this great host of visible and invisible forces to grow. 

And in turn you enrich the soil and prevent erosion, you provide shelter and food for uncountable life-forms, you regulate the ground water table, purify the air and stabilize the climate. 

I cannot grow in a vacuum either. I too need to receive and to give in order to flourish. 

You are a living illustration of great wisdom. Your kind giving spirit, which provided us with food, shelter and medicine from the wooden cradle to the wooden coffin shows me I was born into a world, which provides for all my basic needs. Many of my deepest questions are answered in endless stories, whispered and illustrated all around us. The outer world mirrors the inner world. High and low feed each other. All things create each other continuously. We are all One. All of us faces of the Great Mystery. All of us connected. One living warm golden heart. A heart that glows strong in you and kept my people warm through cold nights and long dark winters. 

Dear tree, your generous spirit shows how giving and contributing creates an environment full of life and resources, which is capable of giving back in endless wonderful ways. 
May my own spirit be as wise and generous as yours!

Anna Fraser               

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