Knowing Trees
By Tommy Sage
It was a nice spring day, and I was walking through some of my regular nature trails in my hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts, when the sight of fresh buds on the trees reminded me of something. There was a soft glow over the roof of the forest where you could catch the glint of fresh life emerging from the long winter’s sleep.
Life. The life-force. Springtime. Spring is the time for emergence, with crocuses and daffodils pushing through the rich soil and emerging in the light and warmth of the Sun. We celebrate Life, as Life is a gift from God. All life is a gift from God.
If any being is alive, then it has a piece of God’s Spirit within it, which is directly connected to the One Mind of our great Creator. This includes plants and trees. They pulse with life. Their movements are animated. They reach up towards the Sun, dig down into the Earth, yearning, reaching, stretching and ultimately erupting through the soil in the Spring, declaring God’s Glory with their flowers and leaves.
A conscious tree? But what would the consciousness of a tree be? Let’s find out!
Go outside, and take off your shoes and socks. Dig your toes down into the soil. Reach your hands up to the sky. Reeeeeeaaalllyy stretch out those arms and legs, get as long as you can! Now close your eyes. Feel the warmth of the Sun on your face and hands; feel the force of gravity pulling you down like an arrow; feel your Taproot grow long, dig deep into the soil, seeking water.
Stretch out into the earth with your stabilizing roots, gripping the Earth and hanging on for dear life, lest you fall off this fast-moving spinning planet and fly off into space. Balance against gravity towards the sky, feel nature’s arrow pointing the way up, straight up.
Now reach down with your roots and feel the mycelium in the soil, communicating with you and your whole tree-community, shuttling in sustenance and information, and you share what you have to spare for your brothers and sisters.
Feel the sap pulsing in your veins, pumping up the trunk like a heartbeat, pushing the life force you’ve extracted from the ground all the way to the sky. Reach with your branches, reaching, reaching, reaching towards the light. As you reach, you grow branches, with branches becoming twigs, twigs becoming buds, then buds erupting into Glory as they soak up the life-giving heat and light of the Sun. You don’t know how they grow, but you reach and they just grow, because you are a Tree and trees…tree. Trees tree towards the sun whilst treeing down into the Earth.
Feel the breeze in your leaves. Inhale the cool breath of the air exchange. Feel the fire of life burning in your limbs as you reach out from Creation and declare yourself a Conscious Being on this Earth!
That is what a Tree feels like.
But if Trees are conscious, how can we communicate with them? Let’s imagine how a Tree would sense us. Having no sense organs, you can forget about sight or sound or anything like that. But having Life, its consciousness is God’s consciousness and abides in the One Mind, in the great Sea of Information. And since we are also connected to God’s consciousness through the One Mind, we can communicate. We are on the same neural network.
But having no physical sense organs, it would likely sense us as how we attach to our fields of information: our nerve ganglia. I imagine we seem much akin to them, with our inner networks of nerves - trunks, branches and stems. We are an inner Tree and they are an outer Tree.
Talking to a Tree is like when your lover gives you a glance and you smile back, because you know exactly what they mean; it’s not complicated—it’s one of the most simple things imaginable.
But don’t take my word for it. Go spend some time with plants and trees. Climb a tree. Hug a tree. Talk to a tree.
Bonus points: Talk to a Tree with other Humans around! The Tree will sense your dedication to the communication and amplify their response. Additional bonus points: Don’t explain to the others what you are doing! You’ll really feel something now. The more you put in, the more you get out.
In love, in life, in trees, in anything. Happy Spring.
Long-time Quite Frankly listener Tommy Sage is a writer, musician and psychedelic adventurer. Living in Northampton, Massachusetts, he enjoys jam bands, long walks on the beach, and exploring the hidden depths of the Cosmos.
You can check out his writing at tommysage.substack.com or send him an email at answers@tommysage.com