You know.. sometimes travel memories light you up from inside. This is one such recollection that I want to share with you. I had travelled to Cold Spring Harbor in Laurel Hollow, a beautiful village in the Town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, on the North Shore of Long Island, in New York. It is one of the finest green spaces I have ever walked through in my life , a place where the density of the trees creates its own soft hush, where the calmness settles into you before you even realise it, where the slowness of the air feels like an invitation to breathe differently. Being someone who has spent most of my adult life in the Middle East, this sort of a space is one of the luxuries I cherish. The interplay of trees and light were like magic. The sunlight filtered through the trees with a gentleness that made everything look newly washed. I remember sitting on that empty bench for a long moment, letting the silence settle around me. The trees stood in their quiet confidence, their branches stretching into the open sky as if reaching for something that had always been there. Sitting there peacefully, I had a kind of clarity that morning that felt almost unfamiliar. Netta and I (may be Ehan also) have fond memories of this place.
The shape of the trees in particular…made me skim through a faint recollection from years ago. I once came across an old illustration in a very old art book, a simple sketch that placed a pair of human lungs beside the shape of a winter tree. I’m not remembering the book. The image had stayed with me without my knowing it, tucked quietly into some corner of thought. I had forgotten its details. But sitting there in Laurel Hollow, the memory returned with surprising clarity. The resemblance was unmistakable now. The trees around me were breathing in their own slow language. And somewhere inside my chest, a matching structure was doing the same. I’ve tried to draw it digitally here. I am marveling at the similarity between the lung airways and the tree branches.
The branches overhead divided and softened into thinner lines, narrowing into delicate paths of light. Deep inside the body, the airways mirror this same patient branching, splitting again and again until they reach the quiet threshold where air becomes life. It is almost impossible not to feel humbled by this symmetry. That the architecture of a tree and the architecture of a lung share the same longing. To hold. To receive. To release.One breathes out what the other breathes in. A silent partnership written long before we learned how to notice it.
Sitting there that afternoon, the shadows of the branches lay across the grass like long fingers of memory. The world around me felt achingly familiar and strangely new. The trees were not just scenery… they were part of a larger rhythm that had been happening around me my entire life. A rhythm my body participates in without instruction, without effort, without acknowledgment most days.
It made me wonder how many miracles move through our ordinary days unnoticed. Trees that give without being thanked. Lungs that work even when we forget them for weeks at a time. The quiet exchange between the two continuing in perfect harmony, whether or not we are aware of it. Whether or not we ever pause long enough to recognise the beauty of being held between them.
There is something tender in this realisation. That the world outside and the world inside are not separate at all. The trees stand on the hillside, reaching upward. The lungs rest quietly beneath the ribs, reaching inward. Both searching for the same invisible gift. Both offering it back. Both shaped by a generosity that requires nothing from us.
Most days, we pass through life too quickly to see these patterns. The branches remain branches. The breath remains breath. The sacred hides inside the familiar. But once in a while, on a morning like that one, something makes you look twice. And in that second look, something opens.
A tree. A lung. Two reflections of the same mercy.
And you realise that all of this continues even if you never notice. But noticing turns the ordinary into reverence. And reverence becomes a quiet remembrance of the Almighty, who shaped both breath and branch in the same loving pattern. A moment of grace. Let not the noise of this life blind our inner eyes. The trees on the sides from your drive back from work, may now look a bit different 🙂
