What Trees Can Teach Us about Being Mindful

As author Alice Peck reflected on the maple tree in her backyard, she began to notice and then study its intricacies and changes.

This became her regular meditation and inspiration.

In her new book, Be More Tree, Alice shares what she has learned from that maple tree, and from the trees all around us.

Every tree tells a complete and ongoing story; from its powerful taproots to the birds that alight on its fragile high branches. Trees reflect our lives through their perseverance and seasonal rhythms; always changing yet consistent. They evolve along a much more protracted timetable than humans.

Like us, trees feel and react to their environment, and communicate with us in subtle but distinct ways.

Alice suggests exploring trees from four perspectives:

1. Roots:wisdom and understanding
2. Branches: symbols and rituals
3. Leaves: healing and science
4. Seeds: transformation and spirituality

All of these elements show us how, although they live outside us, trees offer a path to our inner selves.

From the Bodhi Tree to the Garden of Eden, the Druids to forest monks, medicines to tire swings, people have always received physical, psychological, and spiritual sustenance from trees.

Filled with insights from botany to poetry, ecology to mythology, and herbalism to sacraments, Be More Tree explores the ways these grounded yet soaring entities can steady and move us, teach and transform us, inspire and comfort us.