I have always been drawn to trees. As a child I climbed them. I like to draw and paint them. I have hiked through them more times than I can count. And I have surrounded myself with them in places I have lived.
So it comes as no surprise that I was attracted to the tree as a metaphor for spiritual practice. Someone once shared a graphic with me that illustrates this metaphor. I find it useful in thinking about spiritual practice and in explaining it to others. It comes from a web site called contemplativemind.org.
Since I don’t have the actual graphic to show you, here’s where your visualization skills come in. Imagine your favorite tree for a minute. Imagine its largest branches. In this metaphor, those large branches represent the types of spiritual practices available to us. There are seven: creative, activist, relational, movement, generative, ritual (or cyclical), and stillness.
The “Big Woods” near Anna’s home in Upstate New York