I Talked To A Tree!

You won’t believe what it told me.

Disclaimer: I am sane. Intervention is NOT required.

Last week, late in the day, after forcing myself to trek down the hill to the empty park at the bottom of my street to sit in the grass at sundown (see Earthing.com), I had, let’s call it... an encounter.

It wasn’t much of a sundown, blah, and mostly gray. Still, I plunked down facing west and plugged my bare feet and the palms of my hands into the dense grass and clover. I forced myself to remain still for ten minutes while pretending to enjoy it. (Self-care can sometimes be—such a chore.)

Chore finished, I slipped my shoes on, and while making my way back towards the hill (street) to climb back to whatever nonsense I thought was so much more critical—I froze. Dead in my tracks.

There was a tremor in the Force. Maybe not a tremor—but a VACUUM?—and silence.

Suspended in animation, I turned my head slowly to see…

The TREE—waiting.

Are you kidding me—the tree? The wide, majestic tree that kind of stands separate from the rest? The tree I visited once a week (or thrice a month) on warm afternoons this summer? The thick-barked, vast-rooted behemoth I had perched myself under to read my Kindle and sometimes even an actual book—it’s calling me?

The tree just sat there.

Silent.

I checked over both shoulders and of course, there was no one. I stepped off the pavement onto the grass and approached with caution.

Racing through my thoughts were Luke Skywalker and Yoda and the Dark Side Cave beneath the “gnarltree” on Dagobah. The place where what awaits you is “Only what you take with you.”

My alternate rapid thought: “Am I setting myself up? Is my subconscious about to trick me into hearing an IMAGINARY VOICE induced by an overactive imagination?”

I reached the tree and stopped and stared. Then threw a suspicious and sarcastic look at its thick husk.

I waited.

But nothing happened.

I looked around (still no one) and reluctantly planted the palm of my hand against its chunked-out, crusty skin—in an attempt to FEEL something. But there was nothing. Just silence.

But then I glanced down, and something happened. And maybe it was just a dream or a delusion; who knows?...

But the bark on the above-ground roots began to move...

…Slowly, as if watching decades of growth sped up and condensed into seconds, like the skin of a rattlesnake gliding across a movie screen in slow-mo. Like the melting of a glacier sped up.

There was a parallax in time. And there was a message. A message without words. Tree-speak? Or maybe something else:

“I am like you... only slower.”

—words translated from a feeling; and the feeling was this:

This tree—has some form of consciousness.

And it’s not just THIS tree. It is many other trees. Maybe every tree, but of that, I am unsure.

And by “consciousness,” I don’t mean just energy—the Sun plus water plus minerals. I mean actual THOUGHT, although thought isn’t quite the right word. Awareness?—but I suspect it might be more than that.

I returned to the road, walked back up the hill, and went inside.

And that was that.

Reading in bed last night: an explanation?

Lately, I have been struggling to find a decent book. There are millions of good books, yes. But I’ve struggled to find a book that I can really sink my teeth into. Something fresh and rewarding. It has become a bit of an issue. I download samples on my Kindle but discard them, book after book after book.

But I might have finally found a winner:

Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness by scientist and inventor Itzhak Bentov (Destiny Books, 1988).

Not even halfway through the book, last night, I stumbled upon this passage:

At present we restrict the term “live beings” to beings that can reproduce. This, I believe, is quite arbitrary. We seem to project our own behavior onto other systems, by saying that starting from the atom and going to larger aggregates there is no “life,” and then suddenly, when the aggregates of atoms have reached a certain stage of organization, “life” appears, because we can recognize our own behavior in it. My basic premise is that consciousness resides in matter; put another way, all mass (matter) contains consciousness (or life) to a greater or lesser extent. It may be refined or primitive. We human beings are so designed that when properly trained, we can interact with anything that has consciousness on whatever level. [emphasis added]

Very interesting.