One day Sugar Maples showed us what we look like to them. We were small, like ants, darting out the door scurrying around the house to the garden, car, yard, and road, darting back in again, staying inside for hours hours hours, then boom back outside to scurry scurry scurry, and back in again. Outside, fast busy. Inside, gone from view.
We spend a lot of time inside, I thought. They spend all their time outside, they don’t go inside. And of course, we look fast to them, we live at different speeds.
Then they shared a word, RUKATA. I looked it up. It’s Finnish and means to tweak or adjust a clock.
As the days and months go by their message continues to reveal things to us. As of now, we understand their message in a few ways: take a pause and consider the speed of life of other species, take a long view and remember the billions of years our shared planet has been here before we humans arrived, as you do this your capacity to hold the living experience of different species grows.
With their permission, Sugar Maples guide us in this work. We will continue to do so until they share with us otherwise.
✜