Hugging a tree doesn’t seem imbalanced to me at all, in fact I’ve taken it further. I’ll share my story.

I bought 80 acres along the Red River north of Dallas — Ft. Worth in 2012 at the urging of my son. In Texas we can do wildlife management and gain the same tax abatement as bulldozing the trees and running cattle or hay (agriculture) so I decided to keep the forests, creeks and build habitat for deer, dove, turkey and song birds. I built a pond for permanent water source and habitat structures like birdhouses, raised pallets and lots of bird and deer feeders. I followed a biologists plan and built layered savannas of native grass, brush, trees.

Pretty quickly I discovered everything is deeply connected at a lot of levels. By everything I mean from the soil and it’s microbes to plant diversity to insects on through the whole chain. I had hired the biologist to document a habitat plan and as I did the work I discovered the land was teaching and guiding me, that I needed to watch, listen and learn. Everything — native plants, insects, bees, birds, deer, bobcats, worms, soil and water has responded and diversity and robustness of nature has greatly increased.

Ok, here is where I jump from accepted biology (science) to a place of belief that I cannot represent as fact because I would struggle to produce objective metrics and observational documented repeatable data. I believe as I have gotten closer to nature it communicates with me in some sort of intuitive guidance way. Not only do I touch and hug trees but I talk to them. I examine and talk to every living thing.

There are some events that I have documented that I find a little bit interesting. Wild birds will land on me and sit. I have had a bunting, a cardinal, a titmouse sit on me long enough to photo and video them. Turkey will let me get as close as 10 feet and even though deer are hunted by rancher neighbors they have learned (in my opinion) that my area is “safe” and they walk and graze around my house. I use my smartphone to record this stuff.

I’m going to follow your writings. I believe there is insight in unconscious Jungian theories of psychoanalysis, I had a dozen kids onto the place on 12–21–2020 to look through my 8” Dobsonian telescope at Saturn rings and Jupiter moons and I believe in a new age. I understand and respect the line between western science and the wide range of mysticism but tend to think of it more as a dance than a line in the sand. Two way radio transmission is science today, the very idea would have been stuff of mystical idea 2 centuries ago.

As a 21 year sober alcoholic I’ll read the book suggested in one of your posts. I have come to believe an adage suggested by the method I used to stop drinking that “alcohol is but a symptom” — that there are issues in the nature of my psyche that made alcohol an everyday medicinal solution for me.

There are no beliefs I carry that, at least at the cognitive level, that I exclude from the possibility that I am entirely in error and certainly all are distorted and incomplete. I can’t know all the error and prejudice I have at the unconscious level, there are too many rooms that haven’t even had a flashlight attempted on the unconscious.