What the Tree Can Teach

At the end of our block stands a vaulting, venerable sycamore I call Yggdrasil. 
Walking toward the rising sun, the beagle and I visit the tree each morning. I put a hand out to its emphatic solidity and lean there, looking up and down the road that runs past.
Reaching, it drinks rain and sun, tranquil, living, enduring. Not perfect, it is nevertheless complete in itself. Perhaps no person can truly personify stoicism, but this tree, with its scarred and mottled bark, somehow seems to embody the principle, offering its mute lesson to heedless hurry-pasters for days, decades. 
In Ch’an and Zen Teaching, Lu K’uan Yu wrote, “Once a monk asked of Joshu, ‘Tell me what is the ultimate truth of Zen Buddhism?’ “Josh replied, ‘The Cypress tree in the courtyard.’

“The whole world is the Cypress Tree. Joshu is the Cypress Tree. There is, in short, nothing other than the Awareness of the Cypress Tree, because at this metaphysical zero-point, Being itself in its very non-differentiation is illuminating itself as the Cypress Tree, unique and universal at the same time.”

The tales tell how the Buddha gained enlightenment sitting in the shelter of a tree. "It is the Axis Mundi," wrote Karen Armstrong in Buddha. "the still point of calm where human beings, in many world myths, encounter the Real and the Unconditioned."
Maybe that’s what Odin tortured himself to learn, pierced by his own spear, hanging there from the world tree for those nine days and nine nights. Maybe that’s what the leaves whispered in his ear. The secret of tranquil endurance.