Be a Banyan

Spending winters and early spring in the Sunshine State, I take pleasure in daily walks and the abundant greenery around me. It’s like having a botanical garden right outside my front door. There must be more palm trees than people in my neighborhood. 

Coconut Grove, Florida April 2025

Along with a variety of palms, there are cypress, oak and banyan. Flowering vines and stunning orchid plants are attached to trunks and branches, sharing nutrients with one another and revealing an eco-system that is interconnected and thriving here. With so much foliage, I can walk in an abundant amount of shade and not be exposed to too much sun even in the middle of the day. 

As I walk through cooling pockets of dappled light, I am fascinated by the shape of the trees’ leaves, their movements and trunk textures. One of my favorite trees is the banyan. Even though it has one of the biggest crowns of any tree, it doesn’t start life in the ground. Rather, its seeds grow in the crevices of tree branches and draw water and nutrients from their surroundings. As a seed starts growing, it sends shoots down toward the earth where it takes root. Those shoots keep growing and form their own trunks which in turn send out branches. A banyan can grow so big and wide that one can walk in between its branches and trunks. It’s as if the tree were a large outdoor house with many rooms through which to walk.

The banyan invites us to consider there are many ways to be a tree and there are many ways to be human. We are not meant to follow the same path. We are meant to branch out, to discover and reach for different things. Like those banyan shoots, we also are not meant to stand alone but to be part of a larger whole. To seek rootedness in one another as we make our discoveries and seek support for our challenges and goals. It is in the creativity and rootedness of a majestic and complicated tree like the banyan that we can rejoice in our uniqueness and our kinship with all living beings.