What I Learned from My Green Energy Walk (Blog with Jokes)

One of the things that tells me that I may be recovering from COVID-19 is that I’m able to once again go on walks before bed. I use a step counter watch, and while I’m not yet able to reach 15,000 steps — which was my average in February — in the last week, I’ve been able to walk an average of 8500 steps every day.

This may not be as healthy a habit as in February, but it sure does save me time.

I sometimes combine my walks with a meditation called “Take a Green Energy Walk to Escape the Rat Race.” This meditation involves feeling the auras of the plants around me as my aura brushes against theirs, asking trees to lend me energy for healing, and tuning into the consciousness of plants to ask for advice.

Unfortunately, when I walk at night, it pisses off some of the trees that I’m waking them up for stupid human problems.

I’ve already befriended two specific trees, one of which is a sapling that I call Ben. I’m also connecting with an older tree further down the road, but I don’t yet have an appropriate name for him. I think they think of me as “Squirrelface.”

I guess I should shave before my walks.

I’m not yet satisfied with the results of this meditation. Last night, on my walk, I realized that I often started my walks as Green Energy Walks, but by the time I was on my return path, I had forgotten about doing the meditation. It’s hard to keep your focus going when your muscles are tired and your feet hurt.

Or maybe the trees just aren’t so into me.

Last night, to improve my focus, I talked to the trees out loud. I paraphrased how I believed that they were feeling, and I paraphrased out loud what I thought they would say to me in response to things I said. By instituting this practice of talking aloud with the trees, my conversation with them lasted almost the whole walk.

It only ended when a Canadian maple yelled at me to “Shut up, already!”

I guess that I wanted more help from them, for instance to save the world from climate crisis — as if they could be Ents from J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. But they calmly told me that that task was my job — not theirs. The power that they do have — which they were using — was to send me healing energy.

They reminded me that if a tree is hit by lightning, many times, they survive. And while they may not recover at the same rate that they were growing at before being hit, their recovery takes them closer and closer to that speed of growth as time moves forward. They can help me, they said, with healing at the speed of trees.

But I have to just: “Give it time. Give it time. Give it time.

“Don’t be so damned hasty, little hobbit!”