The Tao of Adirondack Chairs

In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped.  

The timing couldn’t have been better: my new teak Adirondack chair arrived just as I was ready to turn my attention to preparing the “Gathering Energy from Trees” course for this coming weekend at Kripalu.  When you sit in an Adirondack chair and lean back against its wooden slats, your focus moves from the blinkered, straight-ahead plane of goals and to-do lists and shifts upward to the open sky and clouds beyond. As I settled in to my new chair, my muscles unclenched. My mind relaxed, my breath slowed and deepened. Coils of mental distraction loosened and I began to notice the woodpeckers flitting from branch to branch in the canopy of the tree in front of me, and hear how the wind rustled its leaves. It felt fantastic! The moment became so alive, rich, and nourishing on many levels. This is what summer is about--the kind of summer I remember from my childhood, when the hot, sunny days felt full of treasure and joy. And this is what the trees have to teach us: how to be fully alive, present, observant, receptive to the gifts around us.  It’s as simple as that. I sat there for quite a while. Afterwards, I felt centered, refreshed, and ready to stand firmly rooted and flexible, whatever the day brought.

Nature in general and trees specifically heal us by guiding us back to our humanity. We are, after all, part of nature. Often the biggest, most elusive lesson of all, is to remember how to relax enough to be present. We touch on this lesson whenever we remember the “70% rule” and allow ourselves to drop the over-efforting so trained into us. The constant pull to do more, be more, accomplish more, is further exacerbated by technology. However, faster isn’t always better and efficiency can create obliviousness to what’s actually happening to us, as our animal selves. It helps to be reminded how to simply be. Present. Aware. Rooted. Clear. Nature, even seen at a distance through a city window, always offers us this gift.