The tree of life is one's inner axis that grows from the depths of the earth and reaches to the heavens. It connects together the primal opposites of the temporal and the eternal. It is life lived from the "still center of the turning world" and it embraces the deepest human mystery: that we are eternal beings living in a world of time.
grown up at last, how large
I seemed to myself! I was a tree,
tall already, and what I had not
yet reached, I would yet grow
to reach. Now, thirty more years
added on, I have reached much
I did not expect, in a direction
unexpected. I am growing downward,
smaller, one among the grasses.