🌳🌲🌱trees

We are born from acorns, as acorns are born from oaks. And as the words “tree” and “truth” are cognates, so the tree in its acorn form bears truth, too, in nuce. Such would be a rhapsodic reading of the little cupped pellets lying around the forest floor.1

All tall trees are wise, according to the West African teacher Malidoma Somé, because their movement is imperceptible, the connection between above and below so firm, their physical presence so generously useful. The oak, with such size and age and beauty and solidity, would therefore be especially wise, and its acorns will carry all the tree’s kno

Organic images of growth follow the favorite symbol for human life, the tree, but I am turning that tree upside down. My model of growth has its roots in heaven and imagines a gradual descent downward toward human affairs. This is the Tree of the Kabbalah in the Jewish and also Christian mystical tradition.

The Kabbalist tree, as first elaborated in thirteenth-century Spain, imagines the descending branches to be conditions of the soul’s life, which becomes more and more manifest and visible as it descends. The lower it gets, the more difficulty we have grasping its meaning, according to Charles Ponce, a recent psychological interpreter of Kabbalah. A