Mount Tabor, Portland, Oregon
To be grounded means to be well balanced and sensible.
When I think back on my teens and twenties, I remember the good times fondly, many challenging times filled with confusion and difficult emotions, and a huge chunk of time spent in a bubble of scattered thoughts that kept me pretty self absorbed, while at the same time disconnected from my own self. A perfect recipe for being very uncentered and far away from feeling grounded.
I was living IN my head instead of living WITH mind, body, and spirit.
In my late twenties, one of the things I discovered about myself when I slowly began to emerge out of my bubble of comfort and cluelessness was that I always felt more calm, at ease, and less anxious when I was around trees.
On my 29th birthday in late November, I remember it being a beautiful day outside. A good friend decided to take the day off of work to hang out with me and when he asked what I wanted to do, I told him that I wanted to walk around town and take pictures of all the gorgeous trees with fall colored leaves. This turned into a ritual that I adopted no matter the season because I knew it was something I could do to help me feel grounded and more connected to nature, to beauty, to change, and to life.
My love for trees has grown so much in the last 10 years, so much so that now I live in a place known for its magnificent trees. The roots I planted then continue to grow with the knowledge that there is something sacred, glorious, and living that I can always turn to when I need to feel solid, stable, and secure.
Think of what it is that helps you to feel more grounded, then try it. Ultimately, don't we all want to feel well balanced and sensible?
Now I'd like to share these words about trees that profoundly moved me and inspired my writing this for you today.
Found in a magazine called Stay Wild and written in an article called Nor Cal Swimmin Club by Jeff Edwards:
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.”
“When a tree is cut down and reveals it naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured.”