Asking forgiveness from trees

While our tall sky rise buildings that do not emit oxygen watch us remorselessly, the trees that we chop, may in their hearts have some forgiveness for us

There are some religions such as Catholicism which have the ritual of asking forgiveness from a priest so that forgiveness is granted by God, according to that particular belief tradition. 

There is a confessional in Catholic churches where one goes and kneels and tells the priest all the wrong that one has done and gets duly absolved. A small penance such as reciting a few rosaries (a Catholic prayer ritual) is given by the priest for the confessing person to carry out.

A Catholic nun sometime back recalled a story told to her by a priest of a nine-year-old coming with a teary confession of getting angry at a tree for not flowering and tearing up a few branches. Being of a sensitive nature the child had felt acute remorse and had come to confess. The priest had tried to placate. The inconsolable child had sobbed that the tree was his friend and that the name of the tree was ‘Johnny’ and that he had ‘broken’ ‘Johnny’s hand.’ He had christened the tree and named it! Seeing how distressed the child was the priest had given the ‘penance’ of saying a few rosaries which he had later seen the child devoutly doing, kneeling in front of a statue of Jesus all the while.

How old this child is now and if he remembers his old tree friend is something one will never know. But this child when he treated the tree as a friend and as ‘someone’ who could feel, he was speaking the language of Peter Wholleben, the author of ‘the hidden lives of trees; what they feel and how they communicate,’ originally published in Germany as Das Geheime Lehen der Baumer by Ludwig Variag, a division of Verlagsgrupe, Random House, GmbH, Munich 2015.

If we thought that life on earth began and ended with humans, then reading books as these will educate us how trees have a mind of their own and a life of their own. This is what we call consciousness that extends to all living beings and connects us, human, animal, plant-life and the entire universe in one web.

The personalities and habits of different trees are a wonderful source of learning and books as cited above show us a world we do not know. In the Hindu and Buddhist culture and many other cultures of the world, certain trees are worshipped. We know that in our culture, the Bo tree is worshipped because of the assistance provided to the Buddha in his spiritual journey, providing shelter. The Na tree, Banyan tree, the Tulsi, the Devadhara, Betel and Kohomba are amongst plant life we consider as protective and having mysterious healing properties. 

Trees are our friends and it is better that we get to know them. While they are wonderful as friends when alive, when they are dead or unhappy they contribute to the desolateness that we feel now. While our tall sky rise buildings that do not emit oxygen watch us remorselessly, the trees that we chop, may in their hearts have some forgiveness for us, for the lives of luxury we crave that costs us our forests and our life-breath force.

Concepts such as forest bathing and learning about global havens of trees such as the Portland Japanese Garden teach us that we have created our cities in an abnormal way – separate to how humans should co-exist; with nature and as part of it. This should motivate us to create our own ‘health garden’ of sorts even if it is in a few barrels and pots, if we lack landspace.

We will benefit if we read up on work by experts the world over, such as George Washington Carver of the US who proved the qualities and communication between trees and humans. The body of work on the science of healing through energies of trees is also vast and range across cultures. The Harmony page hopes to focus on such work and feature then in the weeks to come.

Human beings of today should re-learn from earth’s ancestors to interact better with trees. We should learn to have them as our friends and maybe tell them we are sorry for what we have done to their home and ours; the earth and attempt to make amends.