John Muir wrote, “It has been said that trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem so to me. I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!” (Teale, 315 from The Wilderness World of John Muir).

This beautiful sentiment that Muir writes about reminds me much about the routine of the day and of everyday life, and the juxtaposition of mobility versus immobility, and the misconception that may lie therein. How many applications I see in the life of a tree!

I think of this concept of motion, and how we think of movement relative to other things. Although fast rooted in place on earth, a tree does move millions of miles through the universe, and that is a refreshing thought as compared to the gloomy, stagnant notion of the fast rooted item. For things are never as still as they seem.

I think of the reverberation of branches touched by the lightest wind, how they wiggle with frequency in the tiniest breath of air, from the hopping nuthatch dancing down the stem. A movement that touches all things someway. One drop of water can start in the soil, move through several hundred feet of cells, and then pop out closer to the heavens; that lightest breath we breath is perhaps gathered from millions of miles of simple routine, some miracle I think.

I look at the routine of a tree to see the beauty in how far we may travel without even knowing it. And I see an absolute limitless there. Imagine the power in the motion of a tree, in one place, and yet the leaf dancing on the wind can flutter endlessly across the earth, feeding the soil and touching how many lives between heaven and earth we may never know.

Through the trees simple routines we can learn a lot about what it means to move endlessly through the cosmos.