This month, my yoga practices are inspired by the understorey: the space between the forest sky and forest floor. Whilst the taller canopies receive our awe and attention, it’s the smaller plants that sustain and nourish them. The less obvious, almost invisible, ensuring the majesty of crowns survive through droughts and storms.
Trees are our lifeline. It’s odd to me that so many are destroyed. 400 year old plus wisdom chopped down in an instant. These oxygen providers ensure our air is clean, provide home to birds and protect animals far and wide. Plus, they’re unimaginably beautiful and provide good ears for our difficult questions and problems. They don’t drown us with advice or make us feel our anxieties are insignificant.
I don’t like to read too much as I’ve always had this odd desire to veer away from becoming a sponge - just “soaking up” other’s information or opinions. I prefer to learn and understand the world from my own lived experiences and interactions. However, this month I was slightly inspired by a book a friend is reading about the majesty of trees.
The understorey seems to me to represent how we live. We’re so obsessed with the grand gestures, large events, with the seen, the obvious, that we forget to notice the subtle intricacies of our lives. The nuances and gestures that link each event. The less obvious, space between and the materials or substances that lie beneath all of our actions.
It’s easy to get lost and fall for the moments that seem most prominent. But it’s the small moments, the ones where we are alone, or with a loved when, when we “have” nothing - these are the moments that are true. For whatever we do, whoever we surround ourselves with, ultimately it all rests on what is beneath. Our values, desires, how connected we are to our bodies, to our breath. Those elements combine to create the undercurrent/understorey of how we play out in the world.
If we fill our time “doing”, we forget our “be-ing”. It’s then easy to cut down the trees, or ignore the understorey; it’s even easy to ignore the overstorey. Because we’ve forgotten who we are. And we’ve lost the point that it’s nature who sustains us, our planet, and all that will ever happen.
I’ve written about it many times before, but when feeling lost, nature is always the best remedy. Long walks observing nature reminds us not only of our smallness, but most importantly of the intricacy and intimacy our lives have with the plants and animals that surround us. With our nature. With others.
How we each depend upon each other.
If only more people stopped to observe the understorey, we’d have less destruction and more compassion in all ways.
Yoga reminds us of body and breath. It nudges us gently to fall in to body. We notice the less obvious and we realise how quickly everything shifts.
It empowers us to listen to our heart and the understorey of who we are. It assures us we are making sense despite humanity labelling our actions otherwise.
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There’s much forest cutting near where I live. And they’re clever about it - the deforesters leave two rows of trees - some must be at least 100 years old. So, to the onlooker, it appears there is a huge sea of beautiful trees. Yet if you look closely enough, the spaces between them reveal the nothingness that lays beyond.
It seems we can not stop this from happening.
And maybe it’s a microcosm of the macrocosm - not many go for walks and wanders through the forests, so even the local people are oblivious to the extent of destruction.
But I can’t help feeling there is hope. For those of us that dedicate time to remembering who we are, to breathing life into our bodies, there must be some solution to all the devastation that exists.
The trees don’t stop growing. And their roots often provide life to the rest of the forest. The trees continue to provide hope.
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“You and the trees in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes…”
