On toddlers & trees
Hi friends, have you ever spent time around a toddler? If so, you are probably familiar with the joyful light they emanate. Well, this isn’t a story about that.
A few months back, an acquaintance and I made plans for a walk. As I arrived, her 2-year-old opened his eyes from his afternoon nap, looked into my big goofy smiley face, and began crying.
“Goodbye, go away now,” he said with teary eyes.
The more his mom and I tried to calm him, the more he pleaded with gods for me to disappear. “I don’t like your new friend,” he asserted throughout the walk.
As the relentless cries of “I don’t like you” kept coming, I convinced myself that my ego could take a little crabby-ness from a child. But once I was done playing cool, a creeping thought set in, what if the kid had a point?
From self-loathing to frustration and defensiveness, my attempts at letting go failed. In response to the manners of the groggy little rascal, I had made myself a bouquet of shitty feelings featuring a centerpiece of shame for harboring hurt feelings at all.
I left the rendezvous defeated; Like a weakling incapable of appreciating the moment or finding amusement in the silliness of a toddler, I put my tail between my legs and refused to make eye contact as the universe laughed at me.
***
Recently, in a book about bark I learned that as trees get older, their bark grows looser and eventually wrinkles into the familiar pattern seen on most trees.
In a way, the older the tree, the more wrinkled, split, and furrowed its skin. Amazed at the thought of bark as skin, I wondered how I’d never heard of anyone judging the beauty of an older tree. If anything, old trees are globally respected and revered.
For instance, years ago with a group of naturalists, I went on an excursion to meet the tallest tree in Massachusetts named, Jake Swamp.
When we finally found the 500-year-old white pine, five of us circled around Jake’s huggable and girthy trunk. The connection was instant. We rubbed our hands and faces on Jake’s bark and many of us leaned our heads on the trunk, as if we were about to hear a heartbeat.
Ram Dass has a saying: “…you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is… You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that…That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees, which means appreciating them just the way they are.”
And so I practice appreciation for the 2-year-old tree that stumbled into my delicate senses. And I practice appreciation for the delicate senses of my 35-year-old tree as I see why it is the way it is.