The Mindfulness of Winter Trees
But instead, I walked outside and sat on a stone wall in the winter sun—a rarity for February in Portland.
My mind would not calm.
The air smelled of the construction across the street. I could feel the wind and dirt and fumes from the cars hurtling by. All the distractions of modern life whirred around me.
I paused, closed my eyes, took a breath, opened my eyes again, and focused on a gnarled cherry tree across the street—still bare with winter sleep.
I pictured it gently, slowly pulling water up from the ground, past each of its rings, in tiny, uphill streams throughout its interior.
I imagined this flow moving in a deliberate and slow flood, hydrating each cell throughout the tree: alive and nourished even in naked slumber with no leaves or blossoms.
This grounded me for the moment, allowed me to practice the mindfulness I'd been reading about on wellness and meditation blogs. To think of the race of tree. Millions of years learning strong stillness. Millions of years learning to drink and savor slowly. Millions of years learning to be exposed with no leaves or flowers for protection. Millions of years turning toward light.
Recently, the Ruminate editors asked the staff to share thoughts on this David Foster Wallace excerpt from This is Water:
“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”
The editors asked us to meditate on “rejecting the spectre of wasted time or lost productivity and instead, to say yes to wonder, slowing down, asking questions, paying attention, and telling stories.”
We’re living in a moment where a trillion distractions and calls to action pull our attention. And as I sat in the February sun, visualizing a quiet internal network of upward streams, I thought: we could learn something from our winter trees.
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.
Barrie Gibby
November 20, 2019
This is so lovely – a reminder of all those metaphors of honoring trees and life with them. In my labyrinth work I encourage partnered synchronicities for “Walking with Trees”