Excerpt from "Discovering the Spiritual Wisdom of Trees"

By Beth Norcross and Leah Rampy

Listening to Trees

As we slowly learn to open ourselves to the spiritual wisdom of trees, our most important practice is to pay attention. This sounds like something a teacher once told me to do as my mind wandered outside the classroom on a spring day. However, when we speak of opening to spiritual wisdom, we’re talking about a deeper, more encompassing way of being in body and soul that engages our senses and tunes our mind to gentle curiosity. This is not the intense focus we often use when we attempt to solve a problem. This is a practice of deep and tender awareness: listening, seeing, sensing, and remaining present to what is, without expectation or judgment.

This contemplative practice is sometimes referred to as a long, loving look at the real1; in this space, we release any desire to judge, fix, use, or change ourselves, the situation, or others around us. In truth, we begin to realize that there are no others. We gaze on the world and acknowledge the unassailable connections to the Holy Mystery that weaves through and among all life and within which all life is held. Such practices focus not on explaining the sacred but experiencing it.

Through many of our experiences in school, work, and other avenues of our lives, we have learned to prize the wisdom of our minds. Yet mystics and wise ones through the ages have understood that the heart is our primary organ of perception. Today those who study the workings of the heart acknowledge that much of the information we receive from the world around us flows to the heart before being routed to the brain.

The heart as a center of spiritual perception and wisdom—mind in heart—is found in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic wisdom traditions. As we interact with trees, we’re invited to shift from only the raw emotions of the reactive ego response, move beyond the limits of logical thinking alone, and perceive with the heart—a wordless, universal understanding of loving connection. The spiritual heart does not divide and separate to understand; the heart harmonizes by drawing on our innermost knowing.2 We already know this heart connection through our love of others. We have experienced the wordless messages that enable us to share joy and pain at unspeakable depths.

We also sense our expanding capacity for heart knowing when we are captured by awe and wonder. Encompassed by awe, our sense of self dissolves into the experience; the ego is absorbed into a larger, transcendent web of life. Like the wise acorn, we are broken open. We feel smaller but not diminished. We know our place in the midst of things. Dacher Keltner, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies awe, wrote that it quiets the parts of our brain given to worry and rumination and enhances those parts that are more communal and compassionate. When we are awestruck by nature, our brains are no longer working in default mode. Our self falls silent.3

From this place of silent self, we are no longer a distinct bundle of personal worries but are enveloped within an all-encompassing oneness. In this space of heart and soul, we may see more clearly the hidden wholeness within every tree, within every being. The divine spark within us recognizes and honors the divine spark in others, and we find ourselves connected, soul to soul. We may be reminded of the Hindu greeting, namaste, sometimes translated as “I greet the Divine in you.”

-Excerpted from Discovering the Spiritual Wisdom of Trees (Norcross & Rampy, 2025, p. 9-11). See below for citations.

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Citations:

1 William McNamara, quoted in Walter J. Burghardt, “Contemplation: A Long, Loving Look at the Real,” Church (Winter 1989), 14–17.

2 Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind—a New Perspective on Christ and His Message (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2008), 35–36.

3 Alice Brice, “After Thoughts: Dacher Keltner on the Science of Awe and Psychedelics,” Berkeley News, February 22, 2021, https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/02/22/after-thoughts-dacher- keltner-on-awe-and-psychedelics.