How Trees Travel
Moving On While Holding Fast to Roots
As important as it is to pause on the threshold, to notice where we’ve been and where we are now, it is equally important, when the time comes, to move on. The 8th thresholding skill named in my book, Trusting Change, is “Moving On.”
I used to think of this in terms of movement – physically, emotionally or intellectually moving into the unexplored terrain of the future. And movement I often associate with leaving. On a canoe camping trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, it means breaking camp, packing up and paddling out (usually portaging too) to a new lake to look for a new campsite. In other situations, it might mean letting go of what no longer fits and setting out in search of a new home, a new relationship, a new faith community, a new support system, a new job, a new way of thinking or being.
But lately I’ve been pondering what moving on could mean in relation to the roots that might be needed to keep us steady in the winds of change.
Maybe it’s because of the windstorm that brought down so many large trees in my neighborhood at the end of summer. Maybe it’s because I’ve been thinking and writing about ancestral roots and how they can support us even if we do not know precisely who our ancestors were and by what journeys their lives led to ours. Maybe it’s just because recently I looked up during my morning walk and saw this:
It was a magnificently tall spruce tree, its peak packed beyond belief with cones while the lower majority of the tree had none. It was breathtakingly prolific and proleptic, a beautiful sign of new life. I thought about last year’s drought and this year’s rain in my region and considered that the tree was probably doing what nature often does to overcome hardship. It makes more seeds. It not only persists. It insists on starting anew, casting possibilities into the wind — one could say “moving on” — all while staying rooted.
But why were they all at the top of the tree?
It turns out that for many trees, the best longterm survival comes from casting seeds as far away as possible from the root system of the one that produces them. Giving seedlings enough room to take sprout where they too can grow tall. Which makes the top of the tree the best place to make use of the wind’s partnership with gravity to carry them away.
What seeds for the future are rising to the top of your heart and mind, and how might you release them as a way of moving on? Even as you draw from the roots that feed and hold you, what intentions are you casting into the winds of change today?
It’s a good season (what season isn’t?) for gathering items from nature to make a small altar beckoning you to move on. Acorns and pinecones. Seed pods and samaras from sugar maples. And adding a note or two with your own intentions for taking one step, and then two more, into the unknowns awaiting you on the other side of your threshold.
If there is fear or anxiety, grief or anger that holds you back,
how might you keep those emotions themselves moving through you?
This gentle nudge to keep moving is also a reminder to keep emotions moving, especially the ones that can calcify and lock us in, wherever we are. If there is fear or anxiety, grief or anger that holds you back, how might you keep those emotions themselves moving through you? What practices could metabolize them, give them expression and transforming them into energy for your next right action? What would help them move on so that you can move on, too?
Take good care, friends.
Karen