The Tree Outside My Window

Green-dappled and shimmering in the sun, the tree outside my window stretches out toward the sky, seeking and breathing sustenance from the sun and air, transforming them into the needed nutrients and chemicals for further growth. But underneath, there’s an entirely different world, like a photo negative or a mirror. The roots, like tentacle brain synapses stretch through the dark, rich, denseness of earth seeking and sucking water.

This tree, like all trees, is interactive with its environment in larger ways as well. Birds and squirrels make their way up or down, back and forth. Ants, grubs, and beetles tunnel around the roots. As Sheldon Silverstein in his book The Giving Tree, it provides us humans with food, shelter, shade, fuel, and oxygen. And more. Its root system keeps soil from eroding making land fertile. The Green World Campaign describes it on their website like this: “Trees restore degraded lands, relieve poverty, and foster biodiversity. They bring back life to struggling rural villages, and, by absorbing CO2, they help the global village, too.” (www.greenworld.org)

These magnificent beings, trees, live at once in two vastly different worlds, giving and sharing with both, and interacting with those around it. They are truly the connectors and transformers of the elements: earth, water, air and fire in the form of the sun’s light come together to promote and sustain life. Is it any wonder trees symbolize the axis mundi of our spiritual lives?

An axis mundi is an object that symbolically acts as the central pole connecting the heaven, or the transcendent beyond, and the earth, the immanent here and now, and around which the believing community gathers. They are like antennae which bring in signals from beyond and make them clear and available to everyday folk. Cultures from all times and places use different objects as an axis mundi. Sacred mountains, or objects that look like sacred mountain such as the pyramids, Mayan temples, church steeples, the Ka’aba act as axis mundi. So do trees. The trees in the center of the Garden of Eden, both the tree of knowledge and the tree of good and evil are axis mundi. A Christmas tree, a May pole, the Bodhi tree, the 8 branched menorah – all of those trees that we believe connect our earthly, ordinary lives with the spiritual beyond and by doing so transfix and transform us – are axis mundi.

Perhaps an axis mundi – whether we believe in a higher power or not – helps us to recognize, as does a tree, the duality of ourselves. We are both rooted, earthy beings with all kinds of animal instincts and needs as driven as the lowly grub. But we are also reaching out, stretching our tenderness out into the atmosphere, absorbing the ephemeral light of intangible nourishment from art, music, poetry, love, care, compassion.

The biblical creation myth says that human bodies were made of the same material as the earth. The Hebrew word ‘adam’ means both ‘mankind’ and the earthy, muddy humus of the ground. In fact, our bodies are made of the same chemicals, minerals and water found in the earth and the universe. So we are – both literally and figuratively – earthy, grounded, rooted, stick in the muds. But that’s not all.
The biblical myth goes on to say that the power of life, biblically called G-d, then breathed ‘nefish’ into us. In Hebrew the word means ‘spirit.’ So perhaps that includes all those intangibles that we think make us different from other creatures: our mind, our imagination, our artistry, our spirituality.

Strangely, like a tree, our bodies seem to inherently be formed to deal with those two elements in the same way. Our earthy part, the part that eats food, makes compost, excretes humus, and is below the nefish part that breathes in air, has great thoughts, and feels immaterial emotions. So, perhaps we too are axis mundi, connectors of the ordinary with the extraordinary, the earth with the heavens. And maybe that’s what the founders of different religions were trying to teach us as role models for our own behavior.

Moses holding the 10 Commandment on the mountain, Jesus on the cross (perhaps a symbolic axis mundi tree?), Buddha reaching enlightenment while sitting under a tree, shamans of indigenous traditions, they themselves are all axis mundi connecting the everyday world with the spiritual world beyond. All of them had extraordinary abilities to channel that which we call the divine and teach it to us earthlings. They, like trees and other axis mundi, became the central pole connecting the two worlds and around which, life revolved. Perhaps those people are role models for us.

Perhaps each one of us, with our feet planted firmly on the ground and our head in the sky, are also tree-like axis mundi. We just need to dig deep, stretch wide, tap into those internal juices, and share with the outside world – just like the tree outside my window does.