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Trees, the soil beneath your feet, the air you breath - Discover the Tree of Life
I sit as I write this on a farm outside Brits - not a place
I would have considered as one of the most attractive on earth, but nature
cannot help but be beautiful, with the bushveld crowding in and surrounded by eroded
remnants of once great, prehistoric mountains.
The garden on the farm is full of trees, exotic and
indigenous, a typical old
Transvaal farm
garden, but the primordial hills surrounding give an almost surreal feeling of
ancientness.
Next to me, in a space delegated among the paving stones, is
a dead tree. In the same space is a new sapling, a Rhus lancea, a Karee, making its way at a strange angle towards the
sky, living off the nourishment provided by the deceased tree. When the farm
house is gone, the farm too perhaps, the Rhus
will reach old age, growing at its puzzling angle. To a later observer,
being uninformed about its origins of growing in a small space allocated to
another, its slant remains a mystery.
It occurs to me that as a fellow creature on this earth, a
tree develops from its seed complete with its genetic blue-print and every
probability, hope and promise. But life doesn’t often allow the perfect to
manifest. This Rhus, competing for
space, will grow as crooked as a tree growing in the face of strong off-shore
winds on a dune next to the ocean. The Rhus
lancea growing on the plot I live on is text-book straight, but alas, it
has not much of a future as urban development engulfs the plots with cluster
homes and it takes up too much space. Its life will be extinguished in front of
an earth moving machine.
Trees are creatures just as we are. They come to life with a
purpose laid out: the obvious one photosynthesis, the green lungs of the
planet. Some have grand occupants such as cheetahs or orangutans, and others
are a more humble support for tree houses and swings. None survive the
furniture and paper industries. Those growing in windy climes bend away from
the wind, having to develop muscle in their trunks, having to hold up huge
branches at awkward angles, or are stunted by drought or barren soils. Others
have had limbs amputated, making way for power lines or a house roof, the
balance of this creature, far larger than the biggest dinosaur or whale, finds
itself under enormous strain, having to counter balance or be slowly pulled out
of the ground by its own roots unable to support its weight.
If we think about it, it is just like us. We are also born
with blue-prints of perfection. faced with our environment, we are flexible. We
bend with the wind and fall to the chainsaws of life. We overcome and live with
our wounds, our scars and our bent and broken limbs;
physical, emotional and spiritual. We find away to live
around them or are cut off from the garden of life. Sometimes we have to prune
and cut off dead wood. We change direction and a puzzled observer may wonder;
judge even, how we turn out, without knowing the environmental pressures that
caused us to be the way we are in the world.
It is therefore no wonder that in the mythology we create to
explain our origins, there is often a story about the Tree of Life. We wonder
why we have moved so far away from that Tree, why we have been cut off from its
sustenance so radically, but we do not realize we are the tree. And so is the Rhus
lancea, that fellow creature growing alongside us. We all grow, survive and
share the ground. We are fundamentally the same. We can see the truth by
watching what lives and dies; grows, struggles and bears fruit around us.
So hear ye all those who hastily chop and destroy. Learn the
lesson from the bent old tree; the friend to birds and children, the breath-takers
for the earth. The Tree of Life is not yet dead; and it is not far away in some
geographically misplaced mythical garden. It is beside you and inside you. Make
sure it continues to live.
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