Julia Butterfly Hill spent a year living in a tree where she not only made a stand for ecological preservation but learned how to weather a storm.
As I started to picture the trees in the storm, the answer began to dawn on me. The trees in the storm don’t try to stand up straight and tall and erect. They allow themselves to bend and be blown with the wind. They understand the power of letting go. Those trees and those branches that try too hard to stand up strong and straight are the ones that break. Now is not the time for you to be strong, Julia, or you, too, will break.
Most of us will never learn the lesson that Julia learned while spending days living in a tree. However, most of us will face storms on the ground of our daily lives and face the question, How we will respond to the forces that challenge us?
Spiritual teachings can confound us when they seem to prescribe contradictory instructions for how to respond to life circumstances. The empowered affirmative approach encourages an, I can make it happen attitude as it recognizes the power of intention and exhorts us to declare and claim how life should unfold for us. It often works because, as the latest science confirms, reality is not fixed, but alterable, not objective, but shaped in part by our perception of it.
The other side of this principle is a passive wisdom approach. The cliché for it is Let go, let God (name your higher power). It promotes a hands-off- the-wheel attitude rooted in faith that a greater wisdom can and will orchestrate the highest good in our life. This can be a most difficult attitude to abide by in the midst of a storm that seems sure to break us. Our survival instincts and spiritual bravado would have us rear up and take a resolute stance to oppose the ill winds of circumstances that surely seem against us.
As nature informs us, robust activity and growth must be balanced with dormancy and release. Leaves do not cling to branches in the autumn because they are encoded with inherent understanding that life is not limited by form. So too is there an active part and a passive part for us in the cycles of our lives. When we understand that our lives depend on a synergistic collaboration between effort and trust, we can be as ready to release the wheel as take to it. As Joseph Campbell observed, We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us. – ls
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