My father’s religion was Mother Gaia, especially her cedar trees. He wrote poetry to the great cedars that once stood in Lebanon.
Below is a picture of a Western Red Cedar with whom I’ve cultivated a relationship over the last year. They’ve become my friend and teacher.
Only recently, I learned they are a cedar. I’m surprised and not surprised. My father’s legacy lives on in me and makes this tree and our connection even more special. (They’re a ‘new world cedar,’ a member of the cypress family, and I, having moved to the States, am a 'new world person.')
Trees like Western Red Cedars who live here in the Pacific Northwest are spiritually important able to aid in “spiritual awakening.” Northwest coast tribes revere them for their healing and spiritual powers. From my interactions with the below cedar, I totally get it.
To me, however, communing with my cedar friend is less a spiritual awakening than becoming resensitized.

Each of us is born into a unique experience of life. Yet, once we move out of the baby stage of total freedom, societal pressure begins to push us to fit into its mold. One that denies the magic children sense all around them.
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Thankfully, this sensing capability isn’t lost. We can become resensitized through nature.

Trees are some of the most helpful guides and companions. I think in part because their lives, compared to human lives, are slow, modeling presence. And in presence, we find life’s magic again. (To me, this magic is the divine.)

Take the contemplative pace of a tree’s transpiration: water slowly rises due to changes in internal pressure caused by moist exhalations through the leaves. From root to crown, it takes my cedar friend four hours to raise a volume of water through their slender veins of xylem.

Near them, my soul senses the low hum of their life. My body adapts and slows its breathing.
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As I lean against my friend, my soul takes up the vibration and shimmies my awareness back into my special spot in the web of greater existence.
In those moments, I know again that I’m woven together with all beings, and for a time, bound to the earth and to each other. And when my earthly life expires, with the greater life beyond.

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Dear friend, I hope this article brought you closer to trees in ways you enjoyed. Thanks so much for taking the time to read. It’s you who make my Medium journey special.
Henry ♡

​You're on the job. But you need more hours to pay your bills. Last week, you got them. Not this week. It’s a crap shoot--though it shouldn’t be--and incredibly stressful.

​I was on commission, running the shop for an absentee boss. He brought in the business, I did the work installing window tint on cars. And everything else, like bookkeeping, ordering product. All the way down to scrubbing the floors and the toilette. When he decided to take time off, work slowed down. 

You need to do more advertising, I said. Talk to car dealerships to bring their cars to us. He just didn’t do it.

I wasn’t making enough commission to pay my bills and nobody else was hiring. That's when I pocketed some of the few jobs that did come in. I was afraid I'd get caught. Ashamed to be a thief. 

I wanted to work for the money, not steal it. But I was desperate. Rent, food, gas.  I didn't have enough work for my commission to pay for those things. 

Then a recommendation got me another job, and I was able to pull out of the hole.

My story is one example of the nightmare of wanting to work but not getting enough of it to make ends meet. For tens of millions of people this is their reality, though for completely different reasons.

For those who aren’t aware of the scourge of part time work, in her New York Times piece, ‘It’s not Just Wages. Retailers Are Mistreating Workers in a More Insidious Way,’¹ author Adelle Waldman sheds light on the epidemic of not enough work and people getting trapped into those situations.

The scheme is called “part-time.”

Employers avoid offering benefits and paying for downtime by only hiring part-timers. Walmart is an example — half their workforce is part-time.²

There are several problems with that. From week to week, you don’t know if you’re going to get enough hours to pay your bills. And unpredictable schedules keep you hanging on in case you’re called in, which is why it’s super hard to get a good second job.

People want to work!

Take one of my Facebook friends. Her crazy hours made it impossible to commit to a specific schedule at a second job she might have otherwise landed.
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If you’re an involuntary part-timer, I am so sorry big business is doing this to you. You deserve so much better, my friend.

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Your story is being told.
¹New York Times Piece by Adelle Waldman
²The Center for Popular Democracy: Trapped In Part-Time
³Proposed law: S 2850 & S 2851 (118th Congress) Proposed law
• A powerful movie, Nomadland, shows the struggle 
• A brand-new book argues that it doesn’t have to be this way: The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy