Everyday Canvas

Humans and Trees

Prompt: Consider a tree for a moment. As beautiful as trees are to look at, we don't see what goes on underground - as they grow roots. Trees must develop deep roots in order to grow strong and produce their beauty. But we don't see the roots. We just see and enjoy the beauty. In much the same way, what goes on inside of us is like the roots of a tree. - Joyce Meyer

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Yes, trees and humans are both living things that inhabit our earth.

People through the ages have looked at trees and have seen the connections between humans and trees. Trees resemble humans and have awe-inspiring qualities that enrich the existence of this planet.

Visually speaking, both people and trees stand upright and have hair/leaves on their heads and while people have legs and feet they walk on the ground, trees have root systems that explore the underground. The rings of a tree across its trunk reveal the age of a tree just like the bones reveal the biological age of a human.

Trees also signal for us a sense of place. Many times, I have found spiritual and emotional healing under the trees wherever I have lived. The fig tree and a huge plum tree in our backyard, while I was growing up, was there behind my first family home. Huge oaks and an apple orchard depict the place where my husband and I raised our children, and the palm trees where we now live adorn our present state.

People’s interconnectedness with the trees is more evident when we view them through an abstract or rather psychological and spiritual sense. While the people’s education, upbringing, and moral and ethical values may show in their behavior, we find in the trees beauty, fruitfulness, and the quality of providing shelter from the sun for any living thing.

No wonder, trees are sometimes planted to commemorate special occasions and they are symbols in our myths like the tree of life. And even to depict our ancestral backgrounds, we have come up with family trees.

Then, we can rarely figure out what can go inside a person, which also is true for a tree. We can’t know what scars or feelings a person may carry inside. We can’t easily see what’s hiding inside the trunk or the roots of a tree either.

Furthermore, like the sap running through a tree, blood runs through our veins and lots of things run in our head, as our inner speech, which is much faster than our verbal speech and more condensed. But then, who knows what runs inside a tree to correspond to that? Maybe we’ll find that out someday because some tree specialists and scientists now insist that trees have a language with which they talk to one another.