Don’t judge – see people as trees

Maybe we all should become tree-huggers writes St Francis Bay freelance journalist Beth Cooper Howell today in her Woman on Top lifestyle column for The Herald

Once a week at Rhodes University, just before sunset, I’d make my way down to a secret forest on the fringes of campus where a solitary oak spread shade across a cultivated patch of grass.

I hugged the oak, trying to catch my fingers around the trunk; but it was big, and I was small, and that’s the way it is with old trees – respectably too-big around the middle.

It was also where I studied before exams and studied people during term time. Hardly anybody sat under my oak.

It was a half-forgotten relic in the midst of modern living; an anachronism, as many old trees are, when allowed to root across several generations.

My dad once told me that trees, like most of nature, are energy conduits. You may feel silly doing it, but pressing your back against a tree, and feeling stronger and better for it, is a real thing.

I’ve done it across several countries; French, Italian, Botswanan, Greek and British trees are one and the same.

There’s something reassuringly immovable about a tree. It doesn’t respond negatively when you scratch hearts on it, or chop at branches, or cull roots in a misguided attempt to landscape.

I simply don’t see the point of ever removing one. I’d rather build around it, than through it.

Few people I know are tree-huggers. But it was cheering to observe the recent worldwide reaction to a piece of prose by Ram Dass, which transforms the mystical magic of trees into a simple treatise on daily living.

“When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees,” says Dass.

“And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are ‘whatever’.

“And you look at the tree and you allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way.

“And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

“The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, ‘You’re too this, or I’m too this’.

“That judging mind comes in. And so, I practise turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”

Turning a sour oke into an oak might sound tree-huggish – but we’re in enough of a pickle these days to try anything once.