The blog will pick a word of the week, to share & explore the selected word. Here’s an expression for the word – Tré (trees in Icelandic).
The philosophy of trees can be understood as a way of thinking about existence, peace, growth, resilience, compassion, beauty & our relationship with nature. Even the smallest tree has a story. To know a tree is to understand that life is both rooted & reaching. Roots are the quiet architecture of resilience. A tree with strong roots can withstand any storm.
Being rooted, yet transforming. A tree stays in one place for its entire life, but it is never truly static. It grows, loses leaves, develops new branches & changes with the seasons. This raises a philosophical question – can something remain the same thing while constantly evolving? A tree teaches us that standing still can also be a form of movement. What looks like stillness may be a lifetime of becoming. “I am rooted, yet I flow.” It also resembles the challenge of identity – if everything about us transforms over time, what makes us the same person?
Growth without a fixed destination. From little seeds grow mighty trees. A tree doesn’t seem to plan its final form. It responds to sunlight, water, soil, wind, injury & competition. This can symbolise a different conception of life – growth as constant adaptation rather than achievement. We often think of life in terms of goals – career, wealth or accomplishments. A tree suggests another possibility – simply flowing & responding to circumstances while continuing to grow, trusting the process.
Time. Trees experience time very differently from humans. A tree can live for hundreds or thousands of years. Its growth rings literally preserve traces of its history. The tree therefore offers an image of deep time – our individual concerns are temporary episodes within the much larger picture. It compassionately offers shade, flowers & fruits without expecting anything in return. Gratitude.
Impermanence. Trees also make impermanence visible. Leaves emerge, flourish, change colour & fall. Branches break. This connects strongly with Buddhist philosophy of being present in the moment, that our life is impermanent, yet our soul is eternal. Mindfulness. The lesson isn’t necessarily that nothing matters. It can instead be – because things evolve or transform, their existence is precious.
Interdependence. A tree appears to be an individual object, but it cannot exist independently. It depends on soil, water, sunlight, insects, plants, animals, birds, bees & the climate. Its existence is therefore relational. Beneath every towering tree is an unseen world of roots. It challenges the idea that an individual is a completely independent entity. Our identities, stories & lives are inter-dependant upon communities & circumstances.
Perhaps the deepest question is whether we should think of a tree as merely a resource or as something with its own form of existence. An ecological view asks – what does it mean for a tree to exist? That shift from usefulness to being can radically change how we understand nature. A tree has no need to explain its existence. It grows, gives shade, bears fruit & eventually returns to the earth. The circle of life.
A simple philosophy of trees – being rooted without being rigid, growing without needing to know exactly where we will end, bending when the wind demands it, letting go of what must fall, remembering that we exist through relationships & understanding that our life is part of a much larger time or space than our own. “He who plants a tree plants hope” – Lucy Larcom.
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