Hugging Trees
Photo by Kevin Young on Unsplash
Yesterday, for two hours in the middle of the afternoon, I stood in a park and hugged a tree.
This particular park is on Chiang Mai University’s campus and it gets a fair share of traffic. I wasn’t hidden away in the forest, peacefully hugging a tree all by my lonesome.
I was doing it as the gardener tended to the other trees, as college students strolled, as families frolicked.
I’d like to pause for a moment here to acknowledge that today is my three-year wedding anniversary. It’s October 26, 2022, and, come sunset, Sam and I will have been married for three glorious years.
I mean that. I find our marriage glorious. If anyone were to go through the, “Can you believe how lucky we are?!” texts I send Sam, they would surely gag. Actually, they’d probably full-on vomit. I’m a sap and not a single day passes where my husband doesn’t hear effusive proclamations of love. Well, okay, maybe a single day every now and again. But, in general, I’m a prolific proclaimer of, “This being your wife thing? Ten out of ten. Highly recommend.” Sometimes I even throw him parades.
This aside comes from a place of deep delight. Largely because I’m picturing Sam’s face when he gets his “Keely’s published a new morning musing” email and he opens it, knowing it’s our anniversary and kinda sorta expecting a musing about marriage, then reading an opening line that says, “Yesterday, for two hours in the middle of the afternoon, I stood in a park and hugged a tree.”
I feel profound amusement picturing his face and internal dialogue. Because he will, without doubt, shake his head, then shift into a place of absolute acceptance. “Yep, makes sense that my wife, the daily muser, didn’t focus on marriage on our anniversary and instead wrote about hugging trees. That’s par for the course and I should have expected nothing less.”
The truth about my writing (and 87% of my life) is that I don’t force anything. I sit down with a cup of coffee, ask to be put to good use, then close my eyes and connect with whatever idea has the most juice. Today, the most juice was behind tree hugging. So that’s what I started writing about.
I find the tree-hugging fascinating not because of the tree-hugging, but because of the public nature. I came out of childhood with an avoidant attachment style. I have long been the type to do whatever I want whenever I want – but to do it privately. Away from prying eyes. Me, myself and I.
So, for this particular bundle of nature and nurture, hugging a tree’s not that weird. But to do it in front of people? To have so much inner peace, confidence, and “well, whatever”-ness to just be doing it on a college campus without a moment’s hesitation?
That’s a “wow, being in my thirties is great thing.” Because Keely of her twenties would have felt quite awkward doing something like that.
It helps that yesterday, in hours of tree-hugging, I wasn’t alone. I was with a Chiang Mai-based Qigong teacher and she was teaching me Tree Qigong. In fact, she’d probably say that we weren’t actually hugging trees, that we were practicing an ancient, highly revered art form. But that wouldn’t have been as catchy of an opening line, would it?
Because I was with a teacher and we were practicing together, there wasn’t a single moment of self-doubt, of feeling awkward about what I was doing. Instead, there was simply delight. The joy of learning something I’ve wanted to learn in the presence of a gifted teacher.
For years, I have been guilty of undervaluing relationships. For much of my life, I wished that I could live alone in a cave, surrounded only by books and blank journals. Maybe pull a Thoreau.
Humans are loud. Humans are disruptive. Humans pull me out of peace and joy and contentment, which is my baseline when I’m alone.
And, at 33, three years into a marriage with a man I adore, I no longer feel that way. I want to be around people more than I want to be alone. I just needed to learn what it meant to have harmonious relationships. To be surrounded by people who don’t feel loud and disruptive. To share my space with humans who help me feel more peace, joy and contentment, not less.
I know that a lot of people come to the planet knowing this. I know that many of you understood from day one that relationships are the most important part of the human experience. But I didn’t. I wasn’t born that way. I needed to learn it over time.
And, sometimes it takes examples like, “Oh, when I had the gift of a good teacher doing the same weird-ish thing right next to me, I felt liberated,” to remember all the perks of being a human connected to other humans, the benefits of doing life with others instead of alone.
One of the perks of being connected to the particular human that I call my husband is that I feel complete security. When I first started writing publicly about things like addiction, depression, coming out of blackouts in jail, really struggling with human-ing–I got a lot of, “You’re so brave” messages.
And today, three years into a joyful marriage, I want to acknowledge that I don’t actually feel that brave. Because I have a level of support that former me didn’t even know she wanted. I don’t feel scared when I put myself out there, because I’m not taking any real risks. I do things in my life, then I go home to a husband who is a ride or die, who will simply shake his head then offer me a hug if I accidentally blow things up by leaping before I look or writing something a smidgen too out there.
So thank you hubbalicious. Thank you for the sense of deep and profound peace that comes from being supported at the Sam Copeland level. Thanks for being a guardian of the galaxy. And thank you for being worthy of all those parades. I love you even more than I love hugging trees.
I hope to continue making you shake your head in disbelief for at least ten more decades,
Your wifey
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