Chapa

Have you ever heard, “Study nature to learn life’s lessons”? Throughout the years (in books, movies, poetry and self-improvement classes and Youtube videos of Native American shaman speaking) I’ve heard something to that effect now and again. While creating this piece I happened upon an example of what that phrase is about.

I’ve known that beavers chopped down trees most of my life. Watching cartoons, as a small child, taught me that. Here is what I didn’t know, beavers don’t just randomly chew trees, they frequently stop chewing and pause to listen to the tree they are cutting. Their pausing in chopping acts as a safety mechanism, allowing beavers to hear sounds that a tree may give off. This moment of pause allows them to hear cracks and shifts in the wood, not only determining when a tree is about to fall but the direction it is most likely to come to the ground. Listening to the sounds a tree gives off assists beaver to avoid being crushed, by allowing them to adjust their position and escape safely before it crashes to the ground.

I now ask myself, “When I was crushed in life, what whispers around me did I choose not to hear? What natural knowing or gut feeling did I ignore or deny? When in business, my relationships, traveling did things not go ‘as planned,’ what is the accountable version? Do I listen? And, if not, why am I not listening. As I pondered this life lesson, taught by the beaver, a big one rose from the depths: “When I’m speaking wisdom on behalf of another and find that the other is not listening (choosing not to hear the creaks and groans of the tree about to fall), how long do I keep talking? When they haven’t moved out of the way…when does compassion say, “It is time for them to learn a life lesson.”

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Beaver use a couple of other techniques, that are not random:

“Controlled Felling”: Instead of cutting through a tree completely, they may wait for
wind or gravity to finish the job ~ after they’ve made the tree unstable. The life lesson
of “patience.” All things in good time.

The “Wedge Technique”: They’ll often chew a tree at an angle to create a wedge shape
that assists in controlling the direction of the fall. Possibly the life lesson of using instinctual knowledge in one’s own DNA.