Sitting With the Aoyama Tree

we had a conversation

Herein lies my first embodied experiment based on What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman by Lerita Coleman Brown. Chapter 2: Our Minds Seethe with Endless Traffic: Center Down. This chapter focused on silence, solitude, and stillness, so I knew my experiment would involve these things.

In the days after reading the chapter, the details about Thurman’s deep connection to nature stayed with me. 

Quietness offered young Howard respite from the racist fury of the Jim Crow South. It also consoled him as he grieved the loss of his father at age seven. … “When I was young, I found more companionship in nature than I did among people. The woods befriended me.”

And I kept thinking about this detail:

Near his home, Howard Thurman spotted an oak tree that would become his favorite refuge. He returned to that tree to share his joys and sorrows with it, and he felt that the tree truly understood him.

I read The Hidden Life of Trees several years back, and it anthropomorphizes trees to such an extent that I’ve been super intrigued by them ever since. They live in community, care for their dying, nurture their young, share resources, and communicate far and wide. They are vibrant and alive.

Last month when my husband and I were walking among the giant coastal redwoods near Santa Cruz, I suggested that we think of places in our life where we felt broken, and lay our hands on a big, old tree to receive its healing. So we did. Did I really think touching the tree was going to do something? I’m not sure. But I probably wouldn’t have suggested it if I definitely didn’t think so.

Point being: I was primed for some solid spiritual tree time. So I decided my experiment would be sitting in silence and stillness with a tree. 

First step: choose a tree. I googled “oldest trees in Los Angeles” and stumbled on: The Eight Most Essential Living Trees in Los Angeles and One Dead One. The Aoyama Tree caught my eye, and after reading about its connection to the development of Buddhism and the Japanese Community in Los Angeles, it seemed especially appropriate for this experiment given Dr. Thurman’s passion for interracial and interfaith spaces. Plus, I had to go to Little Tokyo anyway to visit a café I was writing a short article about. (I’m all for God working with mundane life synchronicities, too.)

After visiting the café, getting caffeinated, and finishing the Friday NYT Crossword (tyvm), I walked to the courtyard of the Japanese American National Museum where the Aoyama Tree lives. It’s between the Geffen Museum of Contemporary Art and the Tateuchi Democracy Forum in a patch of dirt hardly bigger than its wide and deeply rooted trunk. I took a close up look and greeted the tree, read the little plaque declaring it a historical monument, then sat across the courtyard - both because that was the closest seat, and so I could observe the whole of the tree all at once (it’s over 70 feet tall). 

Left: the Aoyama Tree between the buildings; Right: the plaque next to the tree declaring it a historical monument, planted in 1920.

I set my phone timer for 1 hour so I could focus on the tree without needing to check the time. Honestly, I kind of wanted to do two hours, and maybe I will at some future point; but drinking a coffee combined with the reality that downtown you cannot find a public restroom to save your life, I knew an hour was it.

As I pressed start on the timer, I wasn’t sure how to focus my attention. So I just began observing - the various shades of brown and green, the different sizes of leaves, the tree’s general shape and fullness, the way only certain branches swayed when the wind would blow which made it look like it was breathing.

After only about 5 minutes, I started to cry. I think this was for two reasons. One is simply that in silence feelings have the opportunity to bubble up, and they love to take that opportunity. And the day before I’d had a very intense and unpleasant conversation, and my body was still releasing some pent up feelings from that. But I also felt emotion tied to my engagement with the tree herself (yes, herself).

It was striking that this tree’s entire root system had been paved over with the smooth cement of the plaza and a parking lot (paging Joni Mitchell). The Aoyama Tree was growing, and surviving, but with little help from us humans. The “historic cultural monument” designation at least kept us from killing her outright, I guess. 

Humanity’s general devaluing of the tree was emphasized as I witnessed three people interact with her directly in the hour I was there. Plenty of others walked by without paying any notice. 

Relatively early into the hour, an older Asian man approached. He walked up to the tree, adjusted his baseball cap, leaned his back on its plaque stand, and faced her trunk. Tiny in the face of this towering tree, he pulled out a cigarette and smoked it quickly, exhaling billows of smoke into the sky of leaves above him. (The irony of this interaction was not lost on me - one polluting the air while the other cleaned it.)

Soon after came a younger white man. I thought maybe he lived on the streets, and later saw him selling art in a little booth nearby. In his moment with the tree, he darted behind her massive trunk where he was well-concealed, and peed on her. 

Toward the end of the hour, another young guy came, looking snappy in some converse and a patterned button-up. He took a picture of the tree’s plaque and of the tree herself. He then took pictures of pretty much every other object and sign in the plaza.

These interactions made me acutely aware of the tree’s inability to move. Whereas I can generally walk away if someone does something near me that I don’t like, the tree doesn’t have that option. She had been planted, experiencing life in this same spot for more than 100 years, and this is where she would remain for the rest of her life.

There’s something about that steadiness and lack of options that allows for a particular kind of wisdom and patience and grace to grow.

Then the Aoyama Tree and I had a telepathic conversation. I was crying through about half of it, and it took a lot longer to have than it takes to read.

Me: I’m so sorry.

Tree: That’s not really the right response. I am majestic and thriving, what is there to be sorry about?

Me: True. You are amazing - huge and shiny and full. Not pitiful. So…maybe kind of defiant? Like in the face of all this concrete, noise, and car exhaust - you are sticking it to The Man or something? Like, hey, you may be trying to keep me down, but check me out living my best life in spite of all you haters!

Tree: No. Not defiant. Just joyful and grateful.

Me: Hm. It’s interesting that you are not holding anger or bitterness at all the crappy things we humans have done to you, and continue to do to you. I mean someone just blew smoke at you and someone else peed on you.

Tree: Those things are not worth holding onto. My joyful attention is with the tremendous gifts of my Creator. The sunlight. The rain. The wind. The birds. The richness of the depths of the earth where my roots feed and connect. I am bursting with praise.

Me: That’s kind of amazing. Still, with the environment around you as it is, you’re probably going to die.

Tree: Oh, I’m definitely going to die. That’s the way of living things. But I’m not dead today, and that is wonderful. I’m delighted to be alive today.

A bit of time passes.

Me: We are the same.

Tree: We are the same.