4 minute read
1000 Year Old Tree Chuck Van Drunen
1000 Year Old Tree
Sitting here in the trees of the Zuni mountains, I saw a bald eagle and a red tail hawk seemingly enjoying themselves in playful giant swoops. To my left is an alligator juniper that is likely over 1000 years old, and to my right a ponderosa pine that somehow was able to survive growing out of a rock. These teach me now.
Miracles are everywhere.
This earth itself is really the first sacred text, an expansive ongoing revelation of the Creator. If you believe the biblical Genesis account that the Creator spoke our physical reality into existence, then why are we so dull to not respect and learn from this first verbal incarnation.
The alligator juniper I sit next to has likely been through all world wars, the civil war, the revolutionary war, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Holy wars, and the Black Plague of 1350. Yet it seems so serenely content to just gather in and accept the free sustaining sunlight of this day.
The ponderosa pine on my right could be 5 years old, or it could be 100, so hard to say as it appears to be growing without soil out of the most improbable crack in a large rock. It is only 6 inches in diameter but appears healthy somehow. A hundred yards away is a large ponderosa nearly 70 feet tall and two feet in diameter, but it is dead. It was obviously ravaged by some sort of beetle or bug that likely helped or caused its demise. I fancy in my mind that the small ponderosa in the rock could be the same age as the tall one?
Many great spiritual teachers have asked us to consider our natural world for wisdom, to consider the flowers and their short but beautiful existence, the birds and their carefree non stockpiling nature, the mustard tree and the miracle of it coming from such a small seed.
Being in the forest makes me think of our typical human mortality. Somehow...someway I find myself often deceived by the idea that my physical life is much longer than it really is. The reality is that whether one lives to 30 (the world average lifespan in 1900), or 54 (the average lifespan in Nigeria today), or 78 (the average life expectancy today in the United States)...it really isn’t that much time. Even if you live to 117 (the current age of the oldest person in the world) it just isn’t that long of a ride.
When we lose the long view of our limited physical existence, we often lose the preciousness of the present moment and our priorities in it.
Nearly all great spiritual teachers talk of a soul, spirit, or essence that is you but is beyond your physicality. Some really bold religions even state the unity of your soul to the Divine is a present human incarnation, in the present physical world. This reality then simply continues after physical life. In other words, you are a temple for Spirit.
Either way you slice it, and regardless of your religious or non-religious persuasion, the time is short. Because of that it makes little sense to waste any of it in fear. We all lose everything physical in a century or so. Are we going to be ok with that and accept it...or are we going to resist and fight that reality?
I suspect that when we quit resisting it, there is a peace that is beyond mind, a lack of worry about tomorrow, a deep sense of purpose in the present, and even our future mortality loses its sting?
Not that I’ve personally achieved this non-resistance, unfortunately not really, but watching the eagle and the juniper have certainly helped...in my opinion there is wisdom in reading the wordless spoken text of the Creator that is our older sister: earth, sun, and universe.
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