That trees feel and express is being realised, world over. That nature speaks, in its own language, is also a fact, least acknowledged.
I have experienced, time and again, visions and voices, murmurs and groans, smiles and laughter, and sighs of despair. As you walk along, as you say hello to friends, acquaintances, strangers, and to the nature around; you would be surprised that, nature, actually, talks back! The connect wasn’t just with nature I lived with for decades, sometimes you just stroll in a park, a forest or a manicured landscaped garden, and hear voices, vibrations that can be comprehended in peace.
Voices? Vibrations? …some might just think of a learned shrink’s advise.
Trees grow all over the place, breaking pavements and walls, damaging roads, breaking into homes and just destroying; the same species growing elsewhere grow accommodating things around them, hardly raising a brick, perfectly in peace with its surroundings; while one lives happily even surrounded by concrete, a neighbour in a lush garden just wilts, dies.
What makes them to behave (yes behave) differently? Remember kids? how they grow to be rowdy or statesmanly or just a normal everyday person? Commonly we know, its about the climate, environment, ground, soil, manure, water, insects, bees, butterflies, and all that; its also about training, care and most importantly, love. If you care enough, a dead tree comes alive, or a happy tree can simply wither away. They also teach us – about growth, positivity, efficiency, resource management, co-habitation, adapting to change, handling dangers, face in the sun and tiding over seasons, and absolute Life in general.
As I was gathering my thoughts and putting pen to paper (colloquially…), I came across this post, that surmised all that and much more. Reproduced here with permission from Cordele Glass the author, is an article from positivepsychologynews.com
WHAT TREES CAN TEACH US ABOUT DEVELOPMENT
People rarely acknowledge the fact that trees are living beings that eat, reproduce, and react to their environment. Trees have been around for over 390,000,000 years and all of that time has imbued them with an irrefutable wisdom regarding how to live life. The differences between humans and trees are vast, but that does not imply that every bit of a tree’s wisdom can be disregarded as irrelevant. Below are some lessons I’ve gleaned about life and development from some of the wisest teachers I know.
Sometimes Change is a Good Thing
Deciduous trees lose their leaves when they decide the environment calls for a different approach to life and their way of being. This is the change many people associate with red and yellow autumn leaves. It happens gradually yet fully; without hesitation, uncertainty, or regret. They rely on a combination of genetic and environmental factors to help them know when the time for change is right.
Living with the knowledge that change is an inevitable and vital aspect of our development is what helps us to continue advancing in ways that guide our bodies and our surroundings toward harmony. Many developmental psychologists take a lifespan view of development. This lifespan perspective is supported by work in neuroscience with concepts like plasticity suggesting that neural and psychological change continues to take place long after adulthood has begun. Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich has a Ted Talk explaining some of the basic tenets of neural plasticity. Impermanence or perpetual change is also a foundational idea in Buddhist psychology and various other Vedantic teachings tied to acceptance, peace, and spiritual development.
As We Grow, We Transcend and Include
Dendrochronology is the scientific study of trees and how they develop over time. As they grow, each layer continues to contribute to the whole life and being of the tree. The older, smaller parts add to the fullness of the individual tree, and yet there is more that makes up the tree as it continues to interact with the environment, changing over time. The new rings do not reject, diminish, judge, or demean the older parts of the tree. Instead, they include them, they surround them, and they work in harmony to contribute to the whole tree’s life.
As our consciousness develops we begin to take wider and wider perspectives. We begin in infancy by only considering our immediate needs of food and warmth, emotional and physical safety. As we learn and our perspectives grow we begin to consider the needs of others including our parents and our closest friends. Through adolescence, wider social circles become more important to our values, actions, and interests. As social and emotional development continues we begin to include communities, cultures, and nations into our considerations and priorities. Generally speaking, humans tend to move from egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric as we transcend, yet include, each stage of growing up. Each subsequent stage fully includes the prior stage.
This theory of transcending and including stages of consciousness is known as Spiral Dynamics. It was first put forth by Dr. Clare Graves (a contemporary of Abraham Maslow) and later popularized by the work of Don Beck, Christopher Cowan, and Ken Wilbur. Spiral Dynamics synthesizes the gamut of psychology’s best developmental theories into a model of holarchical stages that stretch across the human lifespan and the human species itself. In philosophy, a holon is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part.
Some Parts of Life Need Energy and Some Parts Don’t
As trees grow older, taller, and wiser they often reallocate their resources to leaves and branches that contribute the most to their life, and away from the branches and leaves that are no longer catching light. The unused branches and leaves eventually wither and fall off the tree as the higher branches and leaves flourish and continue to contribute to the tree’s development.
We live in the same world as trees, and in this world, there is a limited amount of energy we can use at one time. Putting this energy into the parts of our lives that help us to thrive and develop is vital to an engaging and meaningful life. Since energy is limited, reallocating energy toward these things may mean that other parts of life, whether they be friends, family, jobs, hobbies, or environments, may have to wither and occasionally be removed all together. Dr. Bonnie Benard calls this process Adaptive Distancing and lauds it as a significant contributor to the development of resilience in children and adolescents. This shedding, reorienting, or diminishing is in service of putting the most energy possible into the friends, family, jobs, hobbies, or environments that contribute the most to our lives.
Being Open to as Much Light as Possible Leads to the Most Growth
Trees try to maximize the surface area of their leaves because they need light to grow. Sometimes they use massive individual leaves like the Bigleaf Maple Tree, sometimes they go for quantity like the needles of a Conifer Tree, and sometimes they reach high above the competition like the Coastal Redwoods.
Many trees grow their branches toward more concentrated areas of light and some plants even move with the sun as it travels across the sky, a process called heliotropic sun-tracking. They know how important light is, and they try their best to openly receive as much as possible.
Finding light in our own human lives is just as vital to our growth. For us, it may come from the kind words of a new friend, the passion felt from an inspiring action in others, or the comfort felt from connecting with our bodies. It may be the awe of a mountain view, the thrill of a favorite sport, or the touch of a loved one. The field of Positive Psychology has dedicated itself to researching these aspects of human psychological light with the above examples supported by hundreds of rigorous studies from around the world. Barbara Fredrickson has demonstrated that our psychological resources can broaden and build with the light of positive emotions. Deci and Ryan have posited that the light of relatedness is a psychological necessity, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has investigated thoroughly how the light of flow states helps to grow our psychological complexity. We too can approach life by being as open and receptive as possible to the things that give us light that helps us grow.
Summary
Trees can teach us to embrace change. They can also teach us that with change we needn’t discard aspects of our past, but rather we can keep them and use them to stay strong as we transcend our current states. Attending to the things we need for growth and being as open to our needs as possible can set us up for continued success. We can act in ways that allow people, feelings, and experiences to fill us up and contribute to life and development of well-being. We can do this without trying to hold onto them forever and without expecting them to be a certain way. Just like trees.
The original article can be read at: https://positivepsychologynews.com/news/cordele-glass/2018091239189
Wise | OtherWise 