Living with the spirit of trees
Collectively, trees are guardians, protecting all life on Earth, just as a single tree gives refreshing shadow under the summer sun. Because of this guardianship of all life and because of the guidance trees provide us with on our spiritual journey, everywhere in the world humans have respected, loved and revered trees. Evidence for this goes back 6,000 years and more, way back into the Stone Age. Humanity has had a deep, 'religious' relationship with trees long before 'religions' were invented. The wisdom of trees is as old as the dawn of human consciousness. When early humans first ever started to ask questions, about themselves and the cosmos, trees were among the first to answer. The spiritual and practical reverence of trees only fully stopped in the 20th century, following industrialisation and the exploitation-of-resources mentality.
Why are trees so special? How did our ancestors show their respect for them? And what can we do today?
Primeval forests – trees for life
Everywhere in nature we can observe the tendency for cooperation. Even in the subatomic world particles don't stay separate and in 'competition' but 'team up' to form greater structures. Atoms in their turn couple to form molecules and, in the biological dimension, these are organized into living beings of a complexity incomprehensible to us. In the landscape, countless animal and plant species constitute biotopes while in the macrocosm, planets, stars and even galaxies group to make up vast systems with their own rhythms, as well as energy and information exchanges.
But the richest and most perfect example for cooperation and teamwork in nature is the natural mixed woodland. The tree cover creates balanced conditions in regard to light, temperature, moisture, soil, the level of the groundwater table and the electric charge of the air. Thus a habitat is provided for a wide variety of smaller plants, animals, birds, insects, spiders and microorganisms. In symbiosis, fungi help the trees to develop nutrients. The deciduous trees, whose deep roots can reach layers of the soil inaccessible to smaller plants, share these nutrients every autumn by shedding their leaves, which get decomposed in the top layers of the soil. Protected from direct light, hard rain and erosion, the soil of the mixed forest is the richest humus on Earth.
Of course, competition, too, is an element in nature, for example when young tree seedlings race for the light in a gap of the forest canopy left by a fallen old tree. But certainly competition has not the primary importance in nature that Charles Darwin ascribed to it. Soon enough, the 'survival of the fittest' theory was used to justify the social conditions and imperialism of 19th-century society. But nature tries to avoid competition. In the animal world, for example, different species with overlapping habitats generally have a different diet while those species who eat the same or similar things generally live in different places.
With its multitude of thriving life forms, its teamwork and its intelligent adaptability the natural mixed woodland is the most essential expression of the character of planet Earth. And, where water or mountain altitudes allow for it, the forest has been the dominant biotope for hundreds of millions of years.
More than just lungs
Since the campaigns to save the tropical rainforest started woodlands have been called the green lungs of the Earth. But trees do much more than just producing oxygen and binding the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
For one thing, trees are exchange organs between the planet and outer space. The Scottish mathematician Laurence Edwards discovered in the 1980s that the winter buds of leaf trees are pulsating rhythmically, reflecting the movements of the planets of our solar system. In this way, the oak, for example, particularly responds to the movements and positions of planet mars while beech responds primarily to saturn, birch to venus, and elm to mercury.
The pulsing of oak buds measured in winter 1982-1983. The greatest expansion of the buds is indicated by deepest points of the line. These coincide with the blach arrows which indicate alignments of moon and mars.
Furthermore, the electrical currents of living trees have been examined in extensive measurements since 1948. The bio-electrical fields of trees react sensitively to the changes of light and darkness, to the moon phases, the seasons, the eleven-year cycle of sunspot activity, the changes in the electrical charge of the air, and even the changes of the Earth's magnetic field. Every event, every change in nature is mirrored inside the trees. Since their electrical currents are so closely linked to their biochemical metabolism it is now possible to predict a tree disease before any outer symptoms are evident, just by measuring the electrical currents of the tree.
But trees receive information from even greater distances. In the mid-1970s Russian botanists discovered an 807-year-old juniper tree (Juniperus turkistanicus) in a very high altitude in the Serawashan mountains (Taijikistan). Its annual rings clearly mirrored the supernovae in our galaxy that we know about (1604, 1770, 1952). They slowed its growth down for up to 15 years. No star in our galaxy can die without trees perceiving it.
Their vertical sap stream turns plants into electrical conductors. Trees in particular constantly discharge air-electrical voltage from the positively charged ionosphere to the negatively charged Earth's crust, as can be seen in their role as lightning conductors. Every electrical conductor creates an electromagnetic field around itself while an electrical current flows through it. And, according to another simple law of physics, the electromagnetical fields of electrical conductors amplify each other when they are parallel to each other and have currents running through them in the same direction. This applies to trees as well. Worldwide, billions of trees are participating in maintaining the Earth magnetic field which is the only protection from cosmic radiation which otherwise would be fatal to all life on Earth.
read further here:
http://spirit-of-trees.net/Living_spirit_e.html
With Love
mudra