Imagine this: your teacher brings you to the middle of a forest and tells you to hug a tree.

He says, “Stay here until I come back,” giving you no information about how long he’ll be gone or what you’re supposed to do, what you’re supposed to learn. So you sit, arms wrapped around bark, and wait.

A Native American shaman, Bear Heart, in his memoir The Wind is My Mother, recounts this incident in his training as a teen. As he sits there, arms around the tree, all of these thoughts run through his head: What will people think? I was voted most promising student. What if they saw me now? ‘This one we thought would go long ways up the ladder, and look at him now, wrapped around a tree.‘

I found this so relatable — the streaming thoughts that arise as soon as I get still or as I go about things that are a bit different, might look a little strange. I thought of how often I myself need a justification or explanation for what I’m doing. I imagine if Bear Heart had some kind of explanation from his teacher, he wouldn’t have been so bothered. “Ok, this is silly, but I’m doing it because … ” Instead, he was left to wrestle with all those thoughts.

Finally, as Bear Heart waits, a lesson arises:

Sometimes we overcomplicate things — they don’t have to imply this or that. … He was teaching me to work through my own ego, my own self-importance. I began to see that, when it comes right down to it, we are nothing until that nothing becomes so dedicated that it is like a vessel through which good things can move, an instrument for receiving knowledge and sharing it with others who might be in need. You might think you’re macho this and macho that, but what is that flesh worth? Not so much.”

Bear Heart, The Wind is My Mother: The Life and Teachings of a Native American Shaman

It’s as if his arms around that tree physically made the shape of openness. He points to a key lesson of the inward journey: Whether we’re sitting with arms around a tree or working diligently at a desk (looking busy and important) or driving an impressive car, what we’re physically doing doesn’t have to “imply this or that” — much of it is nonsense, just movements! What’s valuable is the being, the nothingness, the intention. That nothingness, the openness of arms around a tree is what we’re seeking.

Bear Heart learns another lesson — from the tree itself. It seems to tell him:

‘So you think you know a lot of things? Don’t you know that the only thing you can say you actually know is that which you have experienced? Other than that, it’s hearsay. Yeah, you’ve read a lot of books. But it’s someone else’s thoughts and experiences in those books. To you it’s hearsay, because you haven’t experienced it. You don’t know it, you only know something about it.”

The anecdote reminds me of the quote from Jung that inspired the title of this blog. “Sometimes a tree tells you more than you can read in books.”

Or, Martha Beck says you can write a PhD dissertation about honey, but if you’ve never inspected the tiny holes of a honeycomb, or heard the bees buzzing and working steadily, or put a dab of honey on your finger and tasted it, do you really know honey?

Obviously, I draw great inspiration from books, and I recount to you my experiences in words, hoping for a sense of community in something as solitary as the inward journey. I value words for pointing us to possibilities, learning from others’ range of experiences. But there is a limit to thinking about something like meditation or enlightenment or life or connection or spirituality.

I started the Weekend Quest-ions or weekend practice for this reason — it challenges me, and I hope you, to experience the ideas here. It’s like Pema Chodron says – we can think about patience all we want in our rooms, and then the second we leave, we’re irritated. We have to learn it through real conflict and connection in the world.

And I think Bear Heart’s story points to something more than even just learning through experience. Imagine if Bear Heart had that explanation from his teacher from beginning. He wouldn’t have had to deal with the challenges to ego, and there would have been no risk, no real revelation that he himself came to. It’s so much more powerful to have that “lightbulb moment” of resonance. But how often we go into an experience already expecting what it will teach us or what we might find.

People often approach traveling this way. We (especially Americans!) plan a vacation and then faithfully execute the schedule. Ok, tomorrow I’m going to eat here, and I’m going to do this activity. We don’t always leave ourselves open for mystery, an unexpected encounter, the buzzing sweetness of a surprising landscape or fellow human being sitting right next to us. Rather, we often become frustrated when our carefully constructed plan doesn’t work out.

I’m reminded, like the lesson last week, of entering into meditation, and into my day in general, without mentally prearranging what experiences I will have or what I will learn from them. And what’s more, those experiences may be tiny, almost doing “nothing.” For the time being, I’ve removed myself from “the rat race” and feel it’s a luxury to let the day unfold in the smallest, ant-sized doings rather than planning out a week of To-Dos and living for the weekend. I don’t know what’s coming tomorrow, and it’ll probably be as small as meditating, having coffee, listening to rain. I’m following an inkling that opening to this mystery is important, is what I need to learn now. So I imagine myself in a forest with arms around a tree feeling the bark, listening to the leaves rustle, waiting and attentive for — I don’t know.