Sit with your back to a tree. Hands resting. Nothing to do. Twenty minutes or so.
You’re not meditating, not trying to feel anything special, just being there, letting whatever wants to arrive, arrive.
This is relational awareness, not thinking about connection but being in it.
Something shifts when we lean against oak bark or settle into the curve of a beech trunk.
The usual boundaries between self and world become less insistent.
Your breath might start to settle, matching some quiet rhythm that isn’t yours but is.
The edge between you and the tree softens. Becomes porous.
This isn’t a mystical experience. It’s returning to something we’ve always known but forgotten how to access.
Before we learned to think our way through the world, we knew how to be present with other beings before we started cataloguing and categorising everything we encounter.
Trees don’t ask anything of us. They don’t need our theories or interpretations. They stand, rooted and reaching, offering their steady presence to whatever leans into them.
Against bark, our nervous systems remember an older way of knowing, one that happens through contact, proximity, shared breath, and shared time.
The tree’s aliveness meets your aliveness.
Not as objects bumping into each other but as streams of life recognising themselves in different forms.
Your heartbeat, its slow growth.
Your awareness, its patient witnessing of seasons and storms.
This happens when we stop trying to understand the world and start letting it hold us.
The tree doesn’t become human, and you don’t become tree.
But something in the space between recognises itself.
Something in the quality of attention shifts from grasping to receiving.
Relational awareness isn’t a practice you master.
It’s a way of being you remember.
The tree has been waiting, back steady and roots deep, for as long as you need to lean in.