There are two Ceiba trees at the edge of my father’s hometown Quebradillas, Puerto Rico. Dad would tell me: “these trees were around when Columbus arrived on these shores.” Those Ceibas have captured my imagination for most of my life. More recently, I’ve been resonating with trees as close relatives to humans. Rainer Maria Rilke invites us to consider:
“if we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.”
Sadly, there is no record of how the natives of Puerto Rico, the Taínos related to the Ceiba due to colonization. In looking at my own Taíno ancestry through DNA testing, I see a pattern from the Caribbean islands to parts of South America, which are now Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia — Given that the Taínos are known to have traveled between islands on canoes, I’m imagining a connection between them and the indigenous peoples of South and Central America.
In my research, I discovered that the Mayan’s consider the Ceiba as sacred portals to the underworld [1]. Furthermore, in reading the Mayan tale of “The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun,” Martin Practel writes [2]:
“If, as the Mayan language implies, our lives are really trees, then like water, it is the devoted urgency of the real stories to move toward their origination; their willingness to remain trapped en route home as stories in the dryness of our wood that brings us that precious spiritual lifeblood, causing the nutrients of cultural memory to reach the diverse branches of all peoples.”
It is my heartfelt belief that trees, in particular the Ceibas, have indigenous knowledge stored up in the very manifestation of their being that are essential to our self-understanding and in remembering our sacred mythical place on planet Earth — our own indigenous belonging to Earth. In the spirit of allowing the web of life to reveal itself to us, I respectfully present to you an updated relational metaphor of the human psyche -- the Ceiba Connection Tree of Life — inspired by the works of Inbal Kashtan, Marshall Rosenberg, Carl Jung, Bill Plotkin, and Miki Kashtan.
The line in the center of the image is the topsoil humus, delineating the boundary between Air and the Underground, symbolizing conscious self-awareness (what is visible to the ego) and Jung’s Unconscious respectively.
The use of the Ceiba tree as a guiding metaphor, having a large portion of its roots exposed to Air was necessitated by a conversational thread with Miki Kashtan in which she shared an updated version of Inbal Kashtan’s NVC Tree of Life that was new to me [3]. Miki suggested to Inbal that the main roots be renamed to “Self-Connection”, and the derived roots be split between “Self-Empathy” and “Humanizing”.
“Self-Empathy” is a looking inside to one’s own inner experience, and “Humanizing” is an internal empathic curiosity toward other humans. Given my desire to also include a curiosity to the “more-than-human,” I renamed the second root branch as “Empathic Curiosity.”
The rest of the relational metaphor is elaborated in this other essay. I’m envisioning that many works could be derived from this — starting with a book project.
Please comment below on anything that resonated with you.
Endnotes and References
- Ceiba Tree Wikipedia Reference
- Martín Prechtel, "The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: A Mayan Tale of Ecstasy, Time, and Finding One's True Form", Paperback – Illustrated, July 22, 2005
- Inbal Kashtan, and Miki Kashtan, NVC In The Body, The Fearless Heart Publications, The Center for Nonviolent Communication, available here https://thefearlessheart.org/item/nvc-in-the-body-packet/
Author Jaime L. Prieto, Jr. in relation to the largest Ceiba in Quebradillas, Puerto Rico. Picture taken by Alex Prieto Rivero
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