I’ve been sitting with my back against trees for years now. Twenty minutes, sometimes less. Hands resting on my lap or the ground beside me. Back pressed against bark that’s rough or smooth or somewhere between. Nothing particular to achieve.
I’m not meditating. I’m not trying to commune with nature or channel tree wisdom or whatever else people imagine happens when you lean against an oak.
I’m just there.
And something shifts.
Not every time. Not in dramatic ways. But often enough that I keep coming back, keep finding myself drawn to that same beech at the edge of the common, or the ash down by the stream.
There’s a moment, sometimes ten minutes in, sometimes almost immediately, when the usual sense of where I end and the tree begins gets a bit fuzzy.
My breath slows without me deciding to slow it. My shoulders drop. The constant hum of thought that normally runs through my head quiets down, not into silence exactly, but into something more spacious.
The boundary between my body and the tree’s trunk becomes less absolute.
I don’t mean this mystically. I’m not merging with the tree or downloading ancient forest knowledge. It’s simpler than that, and stranger.
It’s like my nervous system remembers something it knew before I learned to think my way through the world. Before I started naming and categorising and understanding everything I encountered.
There was a time, as a child, maybe, or further back than that, when I knew how to just be with another living thing. When presence didn’t need explanation or purpose.
Trees don’t ask anything of me. They don’t need my theories about interconnection or my gratitude practices or my carefully worded intentions.
They just stand there, rooted and reaching, offering their steady presence to whatever leans into them.
And against that bark, something in me settles.
Not because the tree is doing anything to me. Not because I’m doing anything particularly right.
But because two forms of aliveness are meeting without agenda.
My heartbeat and its slow growth. My awareness and its patient witnessing of seasons. My brief human span and its long arboreal endurance.
This is what I mean by relational awareness. Not thinking about connection but being in it. Not understanding the relationship but allowing it.
The tree doesn’t become human. I don’t become tree.
But something in the space between us recognises itself.
The quality of my attention shifts from grasping to receiving. From trying to get something to simply being available for whatever’s there.
I can’t teach you this. I can only tell you it happens, and that the tree has been there all along, back steady and roots deep, waiting for however long it takes you to lean in.