Redwood Trees: Loving and Beloved Community Elders

By Katrina Matos

Redwood trees are naturally found in only a few places on this planet. The Pacific Northwest region of North America is home to the Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) and Giant Sequoia (Sequoiandendron giganteum). South-Central China is home to the Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides.) All of these trees are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List (International Union for Conservation of Nature).

If you have had the privilege of spending time in a redwood grove, you may have noticed their presence immediately moves you outside the flow of modern time, transported into a time/space that feels both like millions of years ago and like being outside of time altogether. The ancestors of today’s trees were alive when dinosaurs roamed. Redwood trees with shorter lifespans count them in hundreds of years, with longer-lived trees reaching 2 or 3 thousand years.

Greg Sarris, chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria (Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok), relates that the leaves are traditionally used in a poultice to heal earaches. Western medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) also find benefits in redwood trees, including healing effects on lungs as a singular physical organ and also lungs as understood in TCM meridian anatomy. Both systems use parts of these trees to resolve inflammation. The leaves, sap, inner bark, and fruit can all be used for either medicine or food.

Visiting The Redwood Grove

I’m sitting in a redwood grove with a small group of friends. We’re quietly sharing the space, going on our personal internal journeys with the grove and then sharing our impressions together.

I think about the connections of this grove with its surrounding community. This is a network that allows re-balancing, a moving of resources and communications from here to there, within the relationship of mutual aid that exists with the mycelia and many other beings in the extended lifeweb. I think about how organisms are always shedding and giving back what we do not need anymore, things that other beings can take and transform into nutrients and vice versa. An example is humans breathing out carbon dioxide and plants giving oxygen.

I see Redwoods as seedlings, starting from the soil of the underworld and the bones of all our ancestors, human and otherwise. They grow slowly over hundreds of years, acquiring experience, knowledge, and perspective at each new height, interacting with microbes, fungi, insects, chipmunks, birds, and so many other beings. I feel how they retain the experiences of each level, growing taller and taller, until they are towering adults, respected elders of the Earth.

The question arises, “What does it mean to be an elder?” There is a sense of giving and sharing with community members within and across species, with contemporaries as well as those in the younger generations. There is also some separateness and time for introspection.

Breathing Into Balance: Bringing In Love

My experience in that grove was a gift. I felt Redwoods were communicating with me and giving me permission to share their communication with others. I shaped that message into the following meditative practice.

With this practice, you can set an intention to affect all times, places, beings, and elements in a particular environment. You might choose the past, present, and future of a certain place. It could be on the scale of a backyard garden, a city, continent, planet, or the multiverse. You choose the way you want to focus and shape this practice each time you use it.

You can use it to:

  • Enhance a feeling of connection
  • Give a gift of love* and healing.
  • Restore your loving nature and center yourself.
  • Visualize or sense a light-filled web or something similar.

Each being within the web has its own energy presence, a sphere of color or vibration, with threads that connect it to other beings in the web.

Phase I — Start with your breath, using your exhale to release back to the earth anything unwanted–any fatigue, worry, distraction, etc. As you inhale, fill yourself with fresh Life Source energy. Thank the earth for taking on and transforming this energy for you. Stay present with whatever you notice in this process. Follow your breath with a few cycles of exhalation and inhalation until you feel replenished enough to be overflowing with vital energy with an abundance to share.

Set a loving intention of connection and companionship to the other living beings and elements around you. If you feel the need, you can add extra protection by setting up some spheres of light all around the edges of your personal space (like subtle energy lymph nodes) and let them process and transform the energy traveling in and out for everyone’s benefit. This reinforces the intention that all energy is being sent and received for the greatest good of all beings, including yourself. Everyone receives what they need for their best health.

Phase II — Feel yourself as one being of many in an expansive web of connection, aware that you are in relationship with all these other beings (or places, elements, etc.) in the web. As you exhale, send your sense of love, companionship, and dynamic balance to these other beings. As you inhale, receive a sense of love, companionship, and dynamic balance from the universe and other beings within the web.

Give, exhale, pause; receive, inhale, pause; give, exhale, pause; receive, inhale, pause in a rhythmic cycle. Spend as much time as you like in this rhythmic cycle and notice what you’re feeling and sensing. When you feel complete, gently bring yourself back to your more ordinary awareness. Drain any excess energy back into the earth beneath you. Repeat this practice whenever you like.

*Love: I’m using this word to describe that quality of energy that acts for the deepest good of all, with the intention that the needs of all are being met and the opportunity for all to thrive. It holds the contradiction of existing as our individual selves and acknowledges our inseparable connection to each other, making us small parts in one huge organism.

Awareness of connection deepens our compassion, our ability to be genuinely present with each other in a heart-centered way. Our connections let us heal each other with shared sorrow, joy, play, and laughter, amplifying that comfort and sweetness through our sharing. To receive, share, and replenish the abundance of the universe is our birthright as beings of this planet.

Would you enjoy hearing my voice leading you through a version of this meditation? Sign up for my newsletter at GreenSpiritCraft.com, and I’ll send you the link for the guided journey. Stay evergreen, my friends.

Redwood Tree (Sequioa spp.), photo by Katrina Matos
Redwood Needles, photo by Katrina Matos

Katrina Matos helps folks restore beauty and hope, balance and purpose through customized, nature-inspired distance energy sessions and food grade, organic, Reiki and plant-infused skin care. Her work is for people who talk to their plants and listen when their plants talk back. She invites you to keep deepening your connections with your Earth family. You can find out more about her, plus how she works and plays, at GreenSpiritCraft.com.

REFERENCES