A Timely Message from Eucalyptus Trees: Let Go

Marlane Ainsworth
10 hours ago
3 min read

Let go

Close-up of base of tree that is shedding its bark in strips. The setting sun is making the new bark glow deep orange. — A eucalyptus shedding its bark along the track to Evergreen.

Strong seasonal westerlies have littered our daily walk track with wide strips of bark which various eucalyptus trees are happily shedding. This loss of bark is usually a slow annual process but the recent gusty winds are making it happen quicker.

As the old bark falls away it reveals shiny new bark in salmon pink, pale orange and white hues which glow like soft firelight especially when the setting sun’s rays fall on it.

But even as the new bark emerges, looking pristine and perfect, it is commencing its own deterioration process, and next year it too will lie in stiff strips like cardboard at my feet. It reminds me of a line in Sharon Salzberg’s book Real Happiness:

That’s life: starting over, one breath at a time.

Our lives are a continuous stream of starting over.

Each in-breath is another beginning, each out-breath an ending.

This shedding of bark reminds me that old things fall away, and these recent winds remind me that it’s often the stormy winds of life that accelerate this necessary process in my life.

This first month of the new year has found me pensive. I’ll soon be 72 years old. As I said to my 74-year-old husband, Rob, yesterday:

‘Each year I’m getting closer to the precipice.’

Of course, we laughed at the imagery but the older I get the more beneficial it is that I release the heaviness of old things that have no meaning anymore.

It would be madness for the eucalyptus tree to refuse to let the old bark fall off to let the new bark breathe. And it would be madness for me to do a similar thing in my life.

The ageing process, which is increasingly highlighted with every year that passes, is a naturally occurring reminder that this physical form I have taken on will, indeed, soon be just like old bark.

Yesterday, in a free excerpt from a longer video, I heard Eckart Tolle say:

It’s helpful to realise that you are essentially an invisible entity . . . there is that which is beyond the mind and the emotions . . . The most essential thing is to recognise that dimension within yourself, not believe in it but to sense it here, now, when the mind becomes still and emotions subside and then suddenly something opens up and that’s where you are a spiritual being . . . One could say you were a ray of consciousness that emanates from the Source of all life.

Like eucalyptus trees I need to let go of old things. Let them fall away,

The older I get the less I need to cling to my form and temporary identity. They can lie in tatters at my feet, so to speak. And that’s okay because then the spiritual dimension within me can shine through.