hollow tree

A little earlier today, I was walking on one of the mountain paths that traverses around the steep wooded hillside. I know the path well, I frequently walk it, and it passes many beautiful trees. And just now I feel to talk about one of them in particular.

It is not a huge tree, but it is rather beautiful, proportional, elegant. It looks very healthy, plenty of leaves, a good solid looking trunk, until that is, one sees it from a particular angle, and then it is clear that the tree is completely hollow, at least its trunk. From the ground up to where the branches really diverge, there is a big split, and the whole central part of the trunk is missing. But from every other angle you don't notice this and you would never know. The tree looks so healthy. And yet at its core it is empty.

And seeing this tree again today reminds me that this is our reality too, though we like to deny it. From the outside we might look completely solid. We are whole and healthy. But if we start looking inside, inside our trunk, looking for the core of our being, if we try to answer the question, who am I?, we find something rather remarkable. We are like this hollow tree. We are empty. There is nothing that we can pin down and say this is me, this is the I, this is who I am. There is the superficial stuff, of course, and that's like the outer part of this tree, the bark, the branches, the leaves. It's all good stuff. There's nothing wrong with that.

There's nothing wrong with having a particular colour skin, having a name, an occupation, a bank account, a nationality – you know it all, this superficial drivel, the way we define ourself. There's nothing wrong in it, but it's not who I am, it's not who you are. And if you really go searching for who you are, you will find nothingness, emptiness. And that might sound terrible, but it is not so. In fact, that emptiness is beauty beyond compare. If it were any other way, it would be a rather ugly world. Not just the world, the whole of existence would be an ugly thing. But as it is, there is emptiness, non-self. And that hollow core is what binds us together, you and I and the tree and everything else in creation. And that emptiness is not something negative. It's as if it's pulsating with the heartbeat of the universe. It's as if it's a spring, from which water bubbles up. It is the source. It is god. And this is what I felt today as I hugged the hollow tree.