Today’s Tree Report

Today’s Tree Report is brought to you by caffeine and cream, two of my favorite sponsors.

The white pine with its long needles stands tall and almost soft above me, and there’s a darker green spruce beside it. I can’t tell you if the trees have grown since I last sat beneath them, but I assume they have, as that’s what living trees do.

Wind rustles the branches, and plays a bell-like tune on the chimes hanging from the spruce. One by one, Blue Jays take peanuts from a feeder as hens peck at birdseed below. A lone copper fairy light string, nearly imperceptible, dangles on the trunk of the white pine, remnants of an accidental trimming with the weed whacker a summer or two ago.

Of all the times I’ve been out here, I hadn’t noticed the short copper wire until now.

This concludes today’s tree report. 

Since I last wrote an Inspire blog, I’ve been monitoring a lot of trees for no real purpose except to notice, wonder and be, and it’s been transformational in the way that happens when one halts her habitual way of relating to the world. Creating space for possibility inevitably allows for new ways of seeing and being, even if no one notices but yourself. 

My halt came from realizing I was orienting too heavily on producing and performing, and that I wasn’t taking into account my own need for quiet, creative time and discovery. So I paused work offerings, dropped a bunch of social obligations and explored what it was like to be in a moment without a larger purpose but to see what emerged.

Enter: Hooky-Coup, most likely from stage left. 

I would like to explain Hooky-Coup to you, but to explain Hooky-Coup would be to fill the space up with words and expectations that might thwart its power. Perhaps it’d be best to lightly describe Hooky-Coup as something akin to protecting the conditions for emergence, with a slight rebellion against productivity, unless what emerges from your Hooky-Coup is exactly that, then ignore that description, but you definitely need to start with an opening that orients away from accomplishing things. What might emerge? Perhaps today’s tree report. Perhaps nothing.

Perhaps: Tell the truth of where you are and let that be enough. 

This was a discovery during my morning reflections outside, sipping caffeine and cream, drawing with glitter markers on ordinary lined paper, noticing the changing sky and light, and perpetually serving as an island of warmth for my cats in the sea of the damp, cool grass. 

The thing I realized about “truth” though, is that there is no one way of seeing it. 

Truth is a process of noticing and discovery. It can be complex—filled with a jumble of conflicting feelings or thoughts or facts or perspectives or sensations—but it can also be simple, in that you don’t know why something is true, but it just is.

And then there’s play. Play in the sense that sometimes we need permission to play, delight and explore and let go of expectations or an orientation to manage an experience and develop an outcome. That can be a tricky one.

Wandering helps. Wandering along trails in familiar locations but through unfamiliar routes, possibly getting a bit lost if only to turn up mostly where you expected to arrive. Two such trails, one near Green Lakes State Park, and another in Cazenovia, brought me along the back sides of cornfields, between neighborhoods I hadn’t known, traversing old stone walls and meeting giant oaks and maples that’d been spared the ax or chainsaw because they had the privileged location of being part of a boundary line. 

I felt like a wild creature that was always near civilization but never quite joined it, and it was thrilling.

But before I give the impression that pausing one’s conditioned way of orienting to the world, noticing what emerges and wandering should result in thrills, wisdom or satisfaction, I’d like to emphasize that this would create an expectation that could interfere with truth, discovery and unfolding. And that’s not for me to determine for you, or to establish as a desired outcome. 

Instead, I would like to introduce you to the process of noticing, experiencing, shifting and opening up to being in time and space and place in a way that welcomes curiosity, shakes off any sense of needing to be “a certain way”, and invites play, wonder and acceptance to what emerges.

And none of this needs to be important or life changing. 

Merely, you engaging, noticing, being, witnessing, exploring, experiencing, discovering is enough.

It’s a way to approach alive-ness that might not get much emphasis elsewhere as we journey about our daily lives and responsibilities, but it’s worth exploring, because only you can have your own experience, and that, ironically, is what makes it precious.

Thank you for being with me in today’s tree report.

Warmly,