Tell me about the susurrant trees

If you can listen to the susurrant trees, they will tell you of themselves. Their speech is uncomplicated by words, as existence is uncomplicated by ideas. This is Truth.

There is the belief that all language distorts reality — that in the mere act of perceiving, of naming, we skew the light of the thing perceived so that it comes out contorted, malformed, part of it lost amidst the hall of mirrors we passed it through. “What do you call the world?” asks a Buddhist koan. And it is a koan because, in seeking to answer the question, you carry yourself further from the truth.

There is the complementary concept, the mythical idea standing in wishful opposition, of the “one true name:” the arrangement of sounds that represent the truth of any one being, which, if discovered, can grant utter power over it. But this is a fallacy, a dream borne of the human desire to seize upon the world and hold it in our grasp. A thing’s true name cannot be written, it cannot be expressed, it can only be felt. And to do so gives us no power over it, only power over ourselves.

Thus the trees stand and whisper their true name into the wind, fearlessly.

“If trees could talk…” we say, trailing off. Indeed, trees talk; they join the chorus of the singing insects and the fluttering birds and the murmuring stream. Together, they tell of time’s passing. They tell of seconds and eons. Within their telling is woven a rich tapestry of life and death, of love and growth and tragedy — of all that they daily bear witness to. Of all that the earth daily bears witness to. All of it bound and all of it blooming and disintegrating, floating down the clear, sibilant current of time. When you listen to trees talk, you listen to ephemeral change and everlasting stillness.

This is the truth that monks seek in days and months and years of silence. This is the truth we seek when we quiet the mind, and follow the breath. Because the breath is our own true name.

Because when we listen to the susurrant trees, when we join our breath with their own, we shed our clothes and we step, naked and peaceful and unsearching, into the current of time, and we find Truth.