One can hardly be surprised that I hug trees. I call myself a “modern druid,” after all, and isn’t that what druids are supposed to do? Hang around lots of trees? There is a lot to be said for hugging a tree, really. “Tree-hugger,” I know, is a common pejorative for hippies. But really, if you’ve never done it, just let go of your inhibitions and give it a try. When I do it, I feel such a connection to the earth, to the majesty of the living world. I feel the flow of life around me. Trees truly are majestic, noble beings and that is a sense of the tree you can best get by close physical contact.

But there is another form of tree-hugging that I indulge in and that I also invite you to try: tree climbing. It’s great physical exercise for one thing, and I’m all about that. But as a spiritual exercise, it has a lot going for it as well. Take whatever benefit your may get from tree-hugging and about quadruple it.

As I compose this, I am sitting in one of my favorite meditation places. I’m about 20′ in the air, in the branches of a moderately tall magnolia tree on our property. From here, I can look down on the roof of our two-story house, but more importantly, I am in the middle of a swarm of life all around me. It’s a completely different world from that of the ground a mere 20′ below.

You are not only feeling the flow of life, you are in it. Like a baby, cradled in its mothers arms, the boughs support you, gently rocking. You face your fears, climbing higher and higher, growing bolder, stronger, trusting more in the tree to support you.

In the branches of the tree, you are in a liminal space - a “between” place that is not Earth and not Sky, and is thus charged with spiritual potential. The liminality found in the branches of a tree was not lost on the Druids or ancient Norse. Consider the mistletoe, sacred at least in part because it grows neither on the earth nor under it, is not of the earth or of the sky. In Norse legend,  Loki crafted an arrow from the plant to kill Balder. In some tellings of the story, this was possible exactly because of those liminal qualities, having been missed by the Goddess Frigga in protecting Balder from all things of the four elements, or all plants that grow on or under the Earth.

Tree-climbing has grown from a child-hood pastime to something of an “extreme sport.” But it attracts a different sort of person from, say, rock climbing or snowboarding. Unlike other “extreme” activities, it isn’t so much the actual activity itself that engages most practitioners, the climbing into the tree, but the time they spend when they get to where they are going high in the branches. There, they may spend hours relaxing, may even sleep in a specially made hammock, or may just do what I do: commune with nature in an entirely different way than is possible on the ground.

The activity can be taken up relatively inexpensively and safely. It also doesn’t require much physical conditioning. The technical equipment needed costs about $300 or so to get started. That covers the cost of a special harness, rope, and the equipment to protect the tree and the rope from each other. So far, I haven’t used any of that, instead just “free-climbing,” but I’m limiting my options thereby. Unlike in rock climbing, tree climbing gear isn’t so much for safety as it is to open up options and to make it possible to get to places you otherwise can’t reach.

A few good sites for more information are:

Tree Climbers International

New Tribe

Dancing With Trees