Lessons from the Life and Death of a Tree

Start as a seed. Know you have the capacity to blossom, but to do so you must work to acquire water and sunlight. Expand. Grow. Never stop growing. Every day move in the right direction. No days off. You’re growth is inevitable if only you take what is given to you and use it well. Only you can prevent it.

Start as a sapling. Do not be afraid of being small. Every tree that has ever lived was once small. There is one way to grow. You cannot become smaller, unless you allow yourself to become unhealthy. But even that is only temporary. You grow by virtue of your existence and your experience. You are a tree. It cannot be any other way.

Grow thick skin. Produce hard wood. The world of fear, anxiety, and survival is best left to the animals. Let them play their game. Nothing in nature harms a tree. Nothing can, and nothing will. The bears sharpen their claws on your bark, but the bark grows thicker.

You provide value to all life on earth just by virtue of being you. You give nuts, you bear fruit, you provide shade and food. Heaven rains down on you and gives you sun. Nothing needs to be done, nothing needs to be changed. Your existence is a gift to all.

By your fruit you spread new seeds. They are carried far and wide by birds, squirrels, and all the animals of the forest. They are carried on the wind and down rivers until they plant themselves in the soil, where they will grow just as you did. You have created them just as you were created before. Your seeds are in the image of yourself. Watch them colonize the earth.

You will grow tall and proud if you do nothing but be yourself. Do not strive, do not chase, do not wander. When you do these things you delude yourself into thinking that you are lost. You are there. You always have been. Perhaps as you grow bigger and your roots spread you will one day realize just how strongly you are rooted into the ground.

You are both the strongest organism in the forest and the most delicate. You are durable precisely because you are flexible. You are important because you sacrifice. You allow life to pass all around you, through you. You allow bugs to chew into your bark, birds to nest, woodpeckers to shear you away. But you do not let anyone change who you are. They don’t have the power too. You do nothing but give, and so you receive more than anyone else; the strength and love that comes to the gift-giver is large indeed.

You will grow strong and proud. You will multiply. You will live well and happy. And one day you will stop growing. You will stop producing fruits. You will have your time in the sun. You will breath out, and relax. You will retire. When you are ready you will begin to release yourself. Slowly your presence will withdraw. From leaves and through twigs your spirit will return to your trunk, leaving one final display of beautiful color in your leaves before they dry and fall to treat the decomposers of the forest with your last supper.

Breath out. Slowly, relax. Death is the deepest trance. The most beautiful sleep. It will come only when you are ready. When it comes you will not be afraid.

Somewhere, another sapling is just beginning life. Be happy. You have never left because you never arrived. You were just passing through. You have lived. You still live. You will live. There is life in death and death in life. The tree knows this well, and is happy all of its days.

​