Today we all receive the gift of seeing outward from the heart of the tree, seeing out through wood to the system of veins in mid-air.

Each person around the world–in the deserts, in the cities–looks at a tree or a plant or a weed, and meditates.  We graft the tree and human worlds together: we breathe in rhythm, we pour the energy of our minds into your growth, and you increase, your leaves get shinier.  Our skin and your bark, our arms and your limbs, our hearts and your tender unseen pith, there in the holy of holies.

How often your leaves and flowers have been braided into our hair; they’ve crowned our wrestlers and poets and our best charioteers.

How often we’ve walked the trails just looking at you.  That was our day’s entertainment.  We’ve come to you churning with cortisol, made desolate by concrete, just to look peripherally at your green blur, and be with you in this moment.  It’s quiet here in the middle of your lives, on a typical day.  The sun heats the fallen pine needles…

But enough about us.

Today, like everyone, I see your xylem and phloem in the sky.  I feel your leaves on my face.  I sense the miles of roots under my feet though they rest on linoleum.

I see outward through wood, wild wood, in its natural state.

Beautiful tree, we’re so happy to welcome you.  The living room is covered with dirt and moss, twigs and acorns.  Welcome, welcome.  Can we get you anything?  Here’s a dish of rainwater.  Sit, I’ll put on the Nature Channel.

Long silence.

Just relax, sway gently.  Ah, sip that rainwater.  This is a caterpillar-free zone.

An hour for you.  A day for us.

A leaf is drifting down through the apartment air.

Long silence.

Tonight the darkness will be made of all your unified shadows, and I will fear nothing.

Before you leave, is there something of yours I can keep?  That fallen leaf–I tape it to the skin over my heart.  It decays.   So be it.  I wear the fragments.  I look at you, or your cousin, or your cousin’s cousin, and my heart, under the leaf mold, is restored.

Today is your day!  Haha!  You try to blow out the candles, but that stream of oxygen just makes them burn eternally!  Go with God, who also breathed directly into you.