The above is on my kitchen door, the door we use for leaving the peace of home and entering the rest of the world. We go through this door heading to the office, taking Jen ice skating, or getting groceries, which is a whole different thing, now that Will doesn’t live here. Often I’m in a hurry and don’t stop to read the quote.
I’m not evolved like Ram Dass.
I wish.
I let people irritate the hell out of me, which is clearly about me, not them.
When the guy at the office comes into my space, sighs heavily and tells me how much he hates working with women and all the reasons why, I don’t remember to think of him as a tree. I think of him as a typical privileged Boomer male who doesn’t have the sense to realize that he’s complaining about women to a woman. Evolved me might think of him as a Russian olive, that crowds out other trees and steals their nutrients.
(There’s a Russian olive in the park across the street. It’s pretty from a distance. All the dogs, that explore the park, stop for relief at the base of it.)
A driver honked at us the other evening, when Jen was practice-driving a steeply curved stretch along the river. She freaked but maintained her speed. I refrained from turning around to give him my classic stink eye. It’s going to take a lot of practice to call a guy like that a cottonwood, instead of the impatient pain that he clearly is.
Evolved me knows the woman at the grocery, who barked at me for not using hand sanitizer before touching the shopping cart, is a thorny honey locust. She most likely has good reasons for being a germophobe. Unevolved me thinks she’s a loud busy body with too much time on her hands.
Jen is on a committee planning a fundraiser for an animal shelter, where she volunteers. She’s getting a fine education in the dynamics of clashing personality types. She sees the ones who say they do all the work and don’t, the ones who actually do the work and don’t seek credit, the drama queens and the servants. She sees folks who want to control, folks who are willing to be controlled, and folks who don’t even want to be there, but have to, for whatever reason. When she gets home and vents about her meetings, we end the conversations by one of us saying, “Trees! They are all a bunch of different trees.” That, and we also marvel at how much could be handled with emails versus committee meetings.
We are trying to see people as trees. Our hearts are in the right place, but trees aren’t nearly as annoying as people.
I’d broaden the approach to include plants: poison ivy, bella donna and hemlock, to name a few. Did I mention that I’m not as evolved as Dass?
When I’m in my own back yard, trimming raspberries, raking under the lilacs and watching for perennials to poke through, it’s easy to be kind, have my heart in the right place, and see people as trees. There aren’t any Russian olives in my backyard. We’ve no poison ivy or belladonna either, but we do have a lovely bed of lily of the valley on the shady side, which is proof that we can be around toxicity, but we’d be wise to keep our distance.
Like trees and plants, some people clearly didn’t get enough light when they were seedlings. Some are still bent from ever-present high winds. Some were pruned so much you can’t recognize their true nature. It’s not their fault. They’re just trees.
It’s good for me to remember that I’m a tree, too. I can be prickly like a honey locust, especially when crowded by an impatient driver. I know the areas of myself that could benefit from a little more light.
When I can’t see the forest for the trees, I head to the garden and admire the lily of the valley, from a distance.