Every time I look at this tree it gives me goose bumps. Have you met this tree? If you haven’t allow me to introduce you to Methuselah.
From Wikipedia.
Methuselah is a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva) tree growing high in the White Mountains of Inyo County in eastern California.[1][2] Its age of around 4844–4845 years[a] makes it the world’s oldest known living non-clonal organism. The ancient tree is named after Methuselah, a Biblical figure having the longest mentioned lifespan in the Bible of 969 years.
Why am I pondering trees? I’ll tell you why. I’ve always loved trees. Love going into the woods and hugging them. I love standing next to them in my bare feet, feeling grounded and rooted, spiritually as well as physically.
One day while showering a question popped into my mind. Why do trees live longer than we humans do? They breathe in what we breathe out. We in turn are lovingly given and receive what they breathe out, oxygen. So I had to find the oldest living tree we know of. I figured it would be a Redwood. I loved those trees when I first saw them as a child. They made me feel so tiny standing next to them, in the middle of them. But no, Redwoods weren’t the oldest living trees. Methuselah is, at almost 5,000 years old. Whew! That kind of made my head spin, ya know? So trees can live hundreds and thousands of years. Holy Moly!! Could the reason they live so long be, they have no fear in their consciousness?
I love this and it is what really got me looking at trees in a different way. Excerpted from the book Thoughts are Things written by Prentice Mulford (1834-1891)
“Do we expect to find God, realize him more every day, appreciate the mighty and Immeasurable Mind more every day, and get more and more of His Power in us every day only by dwelling on the word of three letters, G-O-D?
You laugh, perhaps, at the idea of a tree having a mind – a tree that thinks. But the tree has an organization like your own in many respects. It has for blood its sap. It has a circulation. It has for skin its bark. It has for lungs its leaves. It must have its food. It draws nourishment from soil, air and sun. It adapts itself to circumstances. The oak growing in exposed situations roots itself more firmly in the soil to withstand the tempest. The pines growing thickly together take little root, for they depend on numbers to break the wind’s force. The sensitive plant recoils at the approach of man’s hand; many wild plants, will not grow or thrive in artificial conditions.
Yet with all these physical resemblances to your own body, you deny the tree or plant such share of mind as the Infinite gives it? No, not that. The tree is a part of the Infinite Mind, even as you are. It is one of the All Pervading Mind’s myriads of thoughts. We see only such part or form of that thought as is expressed in trunk, root, branch and leaf, even as with ourselves we see only our physical bodies. We do not see our spiritual part. Nor do we see in the tree its spiritual part.
The tree is then literally one of God’s thoughts. That thought is worth our study. It contains some wisdom we have not yet got hold of. We want that wisdom. We want to make it a part of ourselves. We want it, because real wisdom or truth brings us power. We want power to give us better bodies, sounder bodies, healthier bodies. We want entire freedom from sickness. We want lighter hearts and happier minds. We want a new life and a new pleasure in living for each day. We want our bodies to grow lighter, not heavier with advancing years. We want a religion which will give us certainty instead of hopes and theories. We want a Deity it is simply impossible to doubt. We want to feel the Infinite Mind in every atom of our beings. We want with each day to feel a new pleasure in living and, commencing where we left off yesterday, to find something new in what we might have thought to be “old” and worn out yesterday. When we come into the domain of the Infinite Mind and are ever drawing more of that mind to us and making it a part of us, nothing can seem “flat, stale and unprofitable.”” –Prentice Mulford
So yes now I AM Pondering Trees. You may want to too.