The Rubber Tree Plant Oracle

You find yourself in a vast, wide forest where the wild rubber tree plants grow. Some of them are 100 feet tall or more, towering up into the sky. You think of the rubber tree plant back home in your bathroom or your aunt’s sunroom or out on the deck at your friend’s place - a domestic cousin to these behemoths. They do have one thing in common, though: They have stood the test of time.

Out of the corner of your vision, an insect crawls up the side of the tree closest to you. You can tell immediately, by the way it’s carrying a leaf multiple times its size and how it feels its way along, that it’s an ant. You can’t explain it, but you know you need to hang out here with this ant for a minute. Something about it is important for you right here, right now.

You’re gazing up into the sprawling canopy where sunlight sprinkles through when your focus shifts and you swear you see what looks like a face staring back at you in the branches. Is that right…? But yes because looking again, there are its eyes and a nose and a mouth. It’s all very peaceful and all very much part of the tree.

The ant comes marching along the upper lip, and the branches shift ever so slightly as the face smiles down at the ant. It watches as the ant treks safely into a nest hidden inside the branches before turning its serene and ancient smile onto you.

You have found The Rubber Tree Plant oracle, and it has a story to share with you today.

The Rubber Tree Plant oracle says:

There’s a quiet calm about the way you’re standing here. Even if you aren’t physically standing, your stance in the world exudes a tranquility that’s rare to find. It’s the kind of ease that makes it obvious, to this old tree at least, that when you get knocked over, you dust yourself off with grace. You re-root. You calmly carry forward. You continue on with the business of growth.

There’s a peacefulness in how you move through challenges, a peacefulness that can only come from a great attunement with the natural order of things and trust in the inevitable ebb and flow of it all.

So sometimes you get knocked down and your dirt goes flying everywhere and your roots go topsy turvy. That just means you’ll get up again.

So sometimes it unexpectedly freezes in the forest. That just means you bask in the warmth and use it to sprout new growth the minute the sun returns.

Your roots and leaves and internal structure are resilient enough to withstand it all and, dare I say, you grow back even stronger and more lushly because of it - every time.

In fact, doesn’t that mean that every time you get cut back or yanked out of your spot, you actually get that much taller, that much sturdier, that much more deeply rooted? Doesn’t that mean you actually will reach a point where you’re unstoppable, formidable, reaching higher and higher into the sky?

To be perfectly honest, maybe without a little challenge and adversity and general BS, you wouldn’t reach as high to claim your piece of sky. Maybe if you grew unchallenged, you would have been happy down below. Maybe you would have been forever content with the rainforest floor.

Without getting knocked down - which seems like the opposite of growth, to be sure - you wouldn’t be headed straight for the canopy like I see that you are. I speak in tree, so I hope you will know what I mean when I say: The canopy is where you finally expand out much farther than your trunk, sharing the space with the other trees at your same height. Ten feet tall. Forty feet tall. One hundred feet tall. Even taller. Up with the sun and the clouds. Far away from the nuisances that once tried to topple you - they look like little ants from all the way up there.

Lots of very unpleasant things try to take down a rubber tree plant as it grows to its maximal and towering height in the wild: fungus, winds, insects, lightning. But the rubber tree plant doesn’t give a single fig. Just like you, all of the giants of the rainforest floor and your home garden alike keep rising, keep adapting, keep calmly growing to the very heavens.

I want to celebrate you for that. It looks so simple to others because you do it with so much serenity. They may even think you got like that because you’ve never struggled. But the opposite is true. Inner peace and outer grace like yours takes so much trial and error, so many challenges, competition from all sides, and a long series of knock outs and get-back-ups to cultivate.

Your feet are firmly grounded while your eyes are fixed on the stratosphere. Everything in between is calm, is sure, and in time with the natural rhythm of the world. Resilience like yours isn’t a buzzword or a phrase used to minimize life’s difficulties.

Yours is true resilience - it roots deep into the earth, trusting its wisdom. At the same time, it spreads far into the air, expanding your reach - more rapidly than you may even realize, even. You’re just growing bit by bit until the moment you feel the sun and taste the breeze and see the clouds and you realize: You’ve made it to open sky.

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About the Artist
Bailey Lewis is an experiential storytelling artist (MFA, University of South Carolina) who combines words, images, and reimagined materials to create intuitive story experiences. Her art has been exhibited and published internationally, and she is the author of award-winning stories which have been featured in The Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. 

Visit the Bailey Sends Word Story Studio site for more about Bailey’s work.