When Did The Leaves Return?

One morning in March, I looked up and the tree was green.

You don’t understand! I could have sworn that the day before, it had been bare. No leaves, branches looking so dry and dead. In fact, three nights earlier I’d used that same bare tree as an analogy on a phone call with a friend, pacing my backyard, probably irritating the heck out of any neighbors listening over their fences. All winter it had been bare, naked branches against a gray sky behind the yard where I’d been sitting most mornings with a book, a cup of coffee, and Milo at my feet.

And then, three or four days into spring, it was a different tree. One day? Two? Three? When did the leaves return? I had been sitting right there!

So I’ve been thinking about that tree a lot lately. About the impossibility of pointing at the moment when seeing actually shifts, when reality starts showing up as the undivided whole it always was. About how the change is undeniable and unlocatable at the same time. In several interviews, hosts have asked me, when did you start seeing things differently? And then I’d narrate an experience when things changed for me, some shift I could locate. Now I realize those are just stories. Like every story, mostly meaningless. Like every story, just a figment of imagination. Like every story, they just need to be dropped.

The hope of the seeker is that one day, something dramatic happens and then they finally become enlightened. My gosh, no wonder the seeking becomes painful and endless. No wonder we become sad when the expectation of some grandiose event fails to happen. So we spend hours in meditation, prayer, fasting. Some reach for psychedelics. Some hope the experience that happened to “random guru” will happen to them. And then what? Sail into the golden sun forever?(I tell you this for free: even if one has an “awakening,” life will come back for its pound of balance).

So here’s what seems true.

We are always being refined. We are always being changed. Even our deep sleep is in favor of wakefulness. Each relationship, each circumstance, each event is in service of awakening. Everything we have ever encountered has been a tool for our “highest purpose,” whether we know it or not. So in some ways, there’s nothing to do. No meditation. No silent retreat. No need for yet another practice.

And yet, the paradox has another face. The meditation, the practices, the silent retreat: those are also what the unfolding is asking for. The pull to lucid waking does the pulling. So what do we do?

We take the posture of the five who kept their lamps filled with oil — the wise ones in the parable of the ten virgins. Their wisdom was this: they didn’t know when. And they kept the lamps filled anyway.

Stay ready. Stay tended. Effortlessly! My gosh, the paradox is the joke after all. The ability to stay effortless yet ready? That’s the entire posture! Isn’t it just crazy that that’s what it means to be awake. LITERALLY!

A few days after this event when I noticed the leaves had grown and the tree was back in its full glory, I went out and stood close to it. Up close, I could see the smaller branches still working, some leaves already flat and open, some still half-curled like fists. And on a low branch I hadn’t looked at all winter, there were tight buds that had clearly been forming for months.

Months.

The whole bare tree had been preparing all winter. What looked like a sudden green explosion was just the final visible move in a long, quiet rearrangement. I think waking up is like that. I will say then that the tree knew. The tree always knew.

So the question isn’t whether anyone is waking up. The question is whether we’ll bend close enough to see what’s already growing.

A small prompt to sit with this week:

If you looked at your life as a whole, do you see what has been unfolding? Remember, you don’t have to make it spring. You just have to bend close.

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