life and the dying

today I went to send some love and healing to one of the largest trees in the local park, the one that I heard by word of mouth that the council have decided to cut down. the beautiful, powerful oak tree, hundreds of years old, is slowly decaying from the inside and is a safety risk, which is completely fair enough. but I wanted to send it some love to help it along. it has been partially severed and must be in a strange state of limbo, i thought.

the tree before any cutting.

So I went to this enormous tree and planned on connecting with its energy with my back to its trunk, spending some time in a sort of embrace, skin to skin. when I got there i felt that its energy was telling my instinct not to go that close to it. some sort of distressed feeling entered my gut. so instead I sat on the grass a few meters away and gazed intently.

i wondered if the tree knew it had been partially cut away - if that was the explanation for the sort of hostility i felt. i thought of how the trees have a sort of instinctual knowledge of when their time comes to shed the leaves of green in the autumn time. the sap begins to flow down and the tree has let go already. the same wise acceptance of a death that happens year after year. the graceful ease into this.

but this tree was coming to an end in a way more permanent. the final turning of the wheel. and i wondered if it knows that. if it can sense that this autumn's descent will be its last.
did he feel his arms being cut off one by one, a harsh knowledge forced into its bark?
did he know this earlier, when he started decaying?

work being done on the tree.


the weight of this was pulling me into the roots in the ground when i noticed a grey squirrel poke its head out from behind a branch to stare at me.
the squirrel scurried all around the tree, its tail moving like a feather duster out of control. it was so alive. it leapt from branch to branch, staring, running, jumping, frenzying all over the place. shards of acorn shell fluttered down from the tall branches and landed not ten inches away from me - scraps of its dinner.

how life and death can hold hands.
i thought of the squirrel and how it would lose its home. how it would find another in the same day. how the squirrel draws nutrients from this tree that is about to die, and one day the squirrel too would die and decay and perhaps nourish the ground the tree was rooted into. the yin and yang. inhale and exhale. give and receive. live and die.

as i was about to leave i sat in a brief metta meditation for the tree. "may you be happy. may you be healthy. may you be safe. may you live with ease." 
i reconsidered this. sent a new blessing. may you die with ease. 
yes. may all the dying, die with ease. x