32 Things to Do in a Tree: A Christmas Manifesto!

December 25, 2017 In Climbing Tree Winter
  1. Climb so slowly you’re barely moving.
  2. Try to reach the top in ten seconds.
  3. In summer imagine a river of sap flowing up into the air through trunk, branch and twig beneath your hands, exhaling itself into the air through the leaves around you.
  4. Find a branch of the right diameter and dangle from it by one hand, like a spider from a web.
  5. When the sun is at just the right angle in fall, find your shadow portrait on the forest floor.  Wave to yourself and watch yourself wave back
  6. Climb through immaculate snow after a  snowstorm.  Try to dislodge as little as possible.
  7. Wonder whether the tree in whose branches you are perched ever, as a two-foot high sapling, brushed the belly of a passing fawn.
  8. Carry up a stone and find the perfect spot for it among the branches (this will be a very different experience depending on whether your stone is the size of an acorn or the size of a raccoon).
  9. Look at the profusion of leaves and the blue sky and the distant hills and think: what I am really looking at is light.  Just light.  A universe full of light.
  10. See if prayer flags, after months outdoors, have a smell.  What is the smell of wind and rain and sunlight woven into cloth?
  11. Hug the tree.  Go on, it’s okay, no one’s watching.  Right against your chest.  Hard.  It’ll feel surprisingly good.  You might start dreaming about it.
  12. Find the first bud to split open in spring; and the last leaf to remain on the tree in fall.  Is there a pattern to this?  Are they on the same or opposite sides of the tree?  Does it change year to year?
  13. When a rain storm is moving up the valley sprint to the top of the tree, so you are up there when the first drenching curtain of rain comes sheeting up the hillside.
  14. Imagine being in the tree when you’re not in the tree.  Then climb the tree and imagine being in it while you’re in the tree.  Which is harder?
  15. In a heavy snowfall, see how long you can sit without moving.  Let the snow build up on your body.  Can you sit for an hour?
  16. Think about the fact that you are breathing the tree.  That in one year it is producing about one eighth of the oxygen that you need to stay alive.  That it is eating your carbon dioxide along with the sunlight that falls on you both.  That you are this intimately bound together.
  17. Close your eyes among the branches and listen to every sound in your sensorium, around and above and below you.  Create a world of sound for yourself.  Go for a swim in it.  (But not with your body!)
  18. See how many pictures you can take in the same tree without producing images that look like duplicates (tens, hundreds, thousands? How much is there in a tree?)
  19. Climb in the pitch blackness of a clouded, moonless night.  Feel every texture of bark and leaf with your hands.  Measure space and its structures with the distance between your hands and your feet.  You are part of the night.
  20. Throw an instrument over your shoulder, climb up, and play it at the top of the tree (for me, a native American or Irish flute).
  21. Climb with your kids, or with friends.  There’s no better place to hang out and talk than thirty feet above the ground!
  22. Bring up a pad of paper and pencil and draw a branch, twig, or leaf.  Or your hand.
  23. Think about how different a tree is from the outside looking in (trunk and branches), and the inside looking out (branches and world).
  24. Close your eyes on summer climb.  Very slowly, and with total concentration, feel your way around the tree by touch alone.  Watch sunlight and shadows pass over your eyelids.  Feel yourself move from warm areas to cool areas, as when swimming.
  25. Try to dance up among the branches (it’s hard and you’ll look like a fool, but you’ll never forget it).
  26. Find a spot among the branches in summer and read for a while.  It will be uncomfortable but time stretches out to eternity.
  27. In winter, climb on a full moon.  From the top of the tree look out on the silver and black world laid out in ancient wonder below you.
  28. Dream that among its branches you are in the arms of a woman.  (Or man.)
  29. Swing from the branches like a lunatic!  
  30. Ponder life.  What better place to do so?
  31. Wonder how you ever survived without this.
  32. Breathe.