For The Love Of Sycamores

Monday, 12 May 2025, 8:59 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

One stormy night two years ago, two odious Englishmen chainsawed a beloved tree at “Sycamore Gap” on Hadrian’s Wall. It was a sycamore “many considered part of the DNA of north-east England.”

Though the Guardian is straining to find “hope and optimism” in its malicious felling, this act of extreme vandalism has been correctly seen as a symbol of humanity’s wider war on nature. Even so, are more and more people “considering their relationship with the natural world?”

For more than a decade, I took meditations under a great, bifurcated sycamore that sat on the bank of a small seasonal creek at the former periphery of town. Some of the most intense shifts in consciousness I’ve ever experienced occurred there. But after few years someone deliberately set a fire that swept through the still semi-wild area, and it charred the white bark of the sycamore.

For a year there was no sign that the fire did any lasting damage, but then saplings sprang up around the base of the tree, and the next year its limbs began to fall off. First small branches, and then bigger and bigger limbs dropped off. Like a leper losing appendages, the tree was slowly dying.

For a decade I continued to take meditations under the sycamore, and the awareness of its unhurried death lent a greater sense of urgency to my contemplations. The dying tree reminded me that the Earth is dying at the hands of man, and that an inward revolution had to ignite if humans weren’t to decimate the planet and leave barren biological deserts to subsequent generations.

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Finally, after a severe winter storm one winter, I saw from a quarter mile away on the bike that the sycamore was gone. It had crashed across the creek in the night.

I sat next to the massive trunk and wept. At first I was despondent, but then I observed how the saplings had already grown into a small circle of trees around the huge stump, little trees that would grow into fine sycamores themselves. Even so, the Earth is still dying, and hope and optimism are a lie.

Here are a few passages from one of my meditations under that great sycamore. I don’t reinforce their memory, since memories of previous transcendent states are an impediment to experiencing immanence in the present.

Two hundred meters from the paved bike path, on the bank of a creek that flows full during winter and spring along the edge of town, sits a great sycamore. It’s home to a pair of kites, a small species of falcon that has one of the most beautiful flight patterns in nature.

I don’t see the kites this day until I stand, after an hour’s passive observation in the warmish sun, in a state of reverence and gratitude. But as I begin walking back toward the bike, the pair of gracile falcons alight the sycamore, and do an aerial dance directly overhead.

One playfully dives toward the other, which in turn arcs away with exquisite grace, its slender white wings glistening in the last full rays of the sun. They cavort above the sycamore like this for a couple minutes, and I have the feeling they are performing before an appreciative audience of one.

Then one of them peels off toward the fields and foothills, while the lone kite flies a short distance away, and hovers. Its fluttering, rhythmically beating wings effortlessly holds it in place as it searches the ground for any movement of mice or other prey.

Miles away, the dark wall of the canyon stands out in breathtaking relief in the late afternoon sun. The lone falcon flies in short increments toward the foothills, pausing and masterfully employing the wind to remain stationary while scanning the ground as a golden light reflects off its white under-wings.

At one point the kite completely stops fluttering its wings for a few seconds, and with a grace beyond words, drops to the ground, its wings pinned back in a ‘V’ as it silently plummets to the earth. It ascends without prey, and I soar away with it.

There is the feeling of not just witnessing something rare and stupendously beautiful, but of being, in that state of heightened awareness, inextricably part of it in an ineffable way.

When transcendent experiencing of the Earth and essence occurs after the mind falls silent in all-inclusive attentiveness, it’s always unexpected and new. For a state of insight to ignite, there has to be a kind of agnosia -- a temporary loss of the ability to recognize the familiar as familiar. That allows a full opening of the mind and heart, which is what the brain truly evolved for.

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail