British comedian Tommy Cooper is famous for saying, ‘pick a card, any card’.
So today I want you to do something similar: ‘Find a tree, any tree’.
Lean against it. Shake your hands and loosen your fingers. Relaxed pinkies.
Become present to your feet on the ground, to the sounds around you, the wind on your skin, the smells in the air, and breathe. Relax. Let it all go. Floomp.
Sense. Be present. Try not to worry or think about the past. Try not to look forward to or fear the future. Here, right now, you with your back against the tree.
Now wait.
Be with this experience as much as possible. There is no right or wrong.
You may catch yourself thinking; when you do, bring your attention back to the sensation of your body against the tree.
After a few minutes, maybe something shifts.
It can start with your breath. You may notice it has slowed without you asking it to, not dramatically, just slowly, a little quieter, a little deeper, sensing, feeling, experiencing life in you and around you.
By allowing the experience to unfold without control and simply being present, you might discover a rhythm that isn’t fully yours.
Maybe your shoulders drop and you haven’t noticed how raised up they were, how held, how stressed.
Maybe something harder to name emerges. Maybe the edge between you and the tree becomes less insistent, less fixed. Not gone, just less defined, less convincing.
Your back rests on the bark, your skin touches something that has stood here longer than you have lived.
The bark may be rough or smooth. The air near the trunk is it different from the air a metre away? Maybe it’s cooler, maybe it’s warmer, maybe it’s stiller.
Your skin and your feelings notice this before your mind conceptualises it: a mind that distances you from the experience by explanation.
Your nervous system recognises another nervous system, even one that operates on a completely different time scale.
This is not magic; it is not mysticism. It is your body knowing things that the mind takes longer to comprehend.
It’s evolutionary, ecological.
We share a biological heritage with every living thing that has ever needed to sense its environment, to respond to light, to track moisture, to find food, and to survive a winter.
That intelligence never disappeared when we became human. It just got over-ruled by our technology, by our civilisation, by our culture as we rose up from the ground onto chairs, onto platforms, onto thrones.
Slowly, as we distanced ourselves from our environment, we stopped using our hands to make and we started using machines to create.
When we feed ourselves we no longer have the sensory experience of our fingers in our food, picking up and reaching into our mouth and touching our mouth and feeding each other in a sensual way.
Instead we bypass that. We mediate the experience through tools and utensils called spoons, forks, and knives. Slowly we rise up away from the physical earth, distanced from our clay body, a body the cultural narrators deem dirty and unclean.
The age of the machines comes in and slowly, bit by bit, our souls become barren, our hearts become closed. And we forget where we are from; we forget our senses, the meeting point between one living thing and another.
The tree might not know you’re there, and even if it does, it doesn’t care in a way we can measure. But your body feels the tree’s presence, and that’s enough. That’s the conversation.
Five minutes with your spine against the bark, breath settling, sensing, and senses alive.
Let your body do what it knows how to do.