It’s a fine, pre-spring morning. Breezy. It feels good. The air is cool, but the sun is powerful enough to warm the skin, so there’s this blend of freshness and heat that feels like permission to breathe a little deeper. The kind of morning that makes you aware of breath itself. Cool as it enters. Warm as it leaves.

I’m looking at our pecan tree, its six main branches splaying like ribs, with sub-branches feathering out. It’s completely devoid of leaves, and I can watch the whole structure sway in the wind. The smaller branches act like wind catchers, and I notice the pattern. The same design repeating itself. A bigger branch breaks into smaller ones, and those split again, and so on, right down to the finest twigs that stitch the air.

It mirros us. The resemblance to our bodies, veins, arteries, nerves, and lungs, amazes me. Bronchi and bronchioles, capillaries and nerve fibers, all doing their work, all tracing that same branching script. The yogi teaches that beneath these countless forms there is but one underlying reality. “There is but One Life,” Yogi Ramacharaka writes, “manifesting in countless forms and shapes.” The tree reaches for light. The lungs reach for air. The vessels reach for nourishment. Different expressions, same current moving through them.

A tree rooted and patient, drinking light from its place, and us moving, sentient, blood flowing, talking. Completely different, and yet not. We move; the tree appears still. But stillness is only movement on another scale. Sap rises. Cells divide. Fibers strengthen. The same intelligence that maps your nervous system sketches the branches against the sky.

If we look closely enough at all living things, we will find that same insistence. The same pattern solving the same problems. How to reach. How to feed. How to feel. Dividing and dividing until everything is touched.

I watch the pecan lift and lean and right itself, and I feel my own chest rise and fall. The wind moves through both of us. Warm sun. Cool air. A bare crown sketching the sky. It is Life expressing itself in many forms, until even the morning seems to breathe.