![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Which means appreciating them just the way they are. And so I practice turning people into trees. And you are constantly saying, “You’re too this, or I’m too this.” That judging mind comes in. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you look at the tree and you allow it. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. Part of it is observing oneself more impersonally… When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. ![]() Answering a question about how we can judge ourselves less harshly, he writes: Ram DassĪ century after Whitman, Ram Dass (April 6, 1931–December 22, 2019) drew on the human-tree analogy in a soulful invitation to treat ourselves - and each other - with the same nonjudgmental spaciousness with which we regard trees. Remembering his most beloved friend, he wrote that she was “true, honest beautiful as a tree is tall, leafy, rich, full, free - is a tree.” I too consider the people I most love my human trees - people firmly rooted in a foundation of moral beauty, relentlessly reaching for the light, bent into their particular beloved shape by the demands and traumas of their particular lives. Walt Whitman cherished them as paragons of authenticity amid a world of mere appearances. Hermann Hesse believed that trees are our greatest spiritual teachers. ![]()
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