For the Love of Trees

When we were born, we entered the world already in love. Being in love was our general vibe. We exuded love from our little baby fingers and little baby toes. Everyone around us felt our love. We made them smile and coo and laugh in delight at our love, because they forgot what love felt like until we came and reminded them. We didn’t need to search for love outside of ourselves because love was already within us. It was part of our DNA. We knew how to love with all our blood. Everything and everyone delighted us because we understood we were all connected – the trees, the birds, the stars, the larger people holding us and feeding us. It was a love-fest. It was lovely.

But then one day we woke up and forgot we were the embodiment of love. We no longer felt love energizing every limb and every laugh and every thought. We started to believe that love was no longer a part of our internal nature and somehow something outside of us beyond reach, something we had to look for externally. The larger people holding us taught us the names of the things we saw – trees, birds, stars. And we believed they were separate from us because they had different names and identifications. The larger people holding us also taught us about borders and nationalities and religions and politics and war and the shadows of the human soul. And we became afraid and put up protective imaginary boundaries around our little loving hearts. That’s when we started to believe we were separate from everything, including love.

We then spent our entire lives focusing on the lack of love. Instead we focused on fear and pain, our walls and our wounds, searching for love outside of ourselves, only to sabotage it when it arrived. We tried to fill the void where love once resided.

We wonder now, why are people fighting in the streets? Why is there not enough to eat? It’s all an illusion. There are no walls. There are no boundaries. There is abundance everywhere, but we choose not to see it. We are blinded by fear. A tree is a tree is a tree. Just because one person identifies a tree as an oak or a sycamore doesn’t mean they are separate and not worthy of love. Both give oxygen and shade. Both provide shelter. Imagine trees going to war. Sounds absurd, right? It’s an idea just as absurd as the larger people fighting for thousands of years because they forgot who they were. They were once babies born in love, as love.

When will the larger people stop fighting? When they remember they were once trees without names.