I keep drawing trees, or people who are sitting in meditation as trees rooted down and branching up.

Not because trees are a safe or obvious subject (though they are both, haha) but because the tree is the most accurate visual metaphor I've found for what an authentic, fully alive person actually looks like energetically.

Deep roots. Wide canopy. A trunk connecting the two.

Here's why that image won't leave me alone.

The chakra system as a tree

The seven-chakra system maps almost perfectly onto a tree when you think about it spatially.

The lower three chakras (root, sacral, solar plexus) are about being alive in a body in the world.

  • Safety and belonging (root).

  • Creativity, emotion, sensuality (sacral).

  • Personal power, will, identity (solar plexus).

These are the energies that keep you grounded, that connect you to physical reality, that anchor you to your actual life.

They're the root system.

The upper three chakras (throat, third eye, crown) reach toward something less tangible.

  • Voice and truth (throat).

  • Intuition and inner vision (third eye).

  • Connection to something larger than the self (crown).

These are the canopy: expansive, reaching upward and outward, gathering light.

And in the center, the heart chakra. The bridge. The trunk. The thing that makes it possible to be both rooted and expansive at once without those two impulses pulling each other apart.

What goes wrong without roots

I see this a lot in spiritual communities, including in myself at times: the pull toward the upper chakras at the expense of the lower ones.

So focused on vision and intuition and connection to source that the body feels like an inconvenience, the practical requirements of being a person feel like obstacles, the ordinary life feels like something to transcend rather than something to inhabit.

A tree without a root system falls over. Regardless of how beautiful the canopy is.

The spiritual path I'm on isn't about transcending the ordinary. It's about bringing something larger into contact with the ordinary.

The art in the studio, the kids doing homework at the table, my gardens, the cuckoo clock in the hallway. All of it is part of the same life as the meditation and the guides and the altar. None of it is more or less real than the rest.

"Rooted enough that you can afford to expand, expansive enough that the roots have something to serve."

Shadow side: What goes wrong without a canopy

The opposite failure mode is also real: so locked into practicality and productivity and the tangible that there's no expansion anywhere. Life is functional. Nothing is fundamentally wrong. And there's a low-grade sense that something is missing, that you're not quite fully alive, that you're doing everything right and it still feels smaller than it should.

The root system without the canopy is underground. Nothing is gathering light.

The integration

The tree image is about integration, not balance. Not 50/50 between grounded and expansive, but fully both at once — rooted enough that you can afford to expand, expansive enough that the roots have something to serve.

The souls I most want to draw are the ones who are doing both. Not perfectly, not all the time... nobody does. But as an orientation. As the direction they're growing.

That's what the tree drawings are trying to capture. Not an ideal, but a direction.