This is an excerpt from my book, Queering Contemplation: Finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spirituality, you can order the book here.

Similar to the ways contemplation and action have been enmeshed since time immemorial, eroticism and mysticism are partners, much as the mountain is covered in trees and the sea is proximal to the shore. While I can’t recall the first time I felt that sense of electricity between myself and another person, I do know it wasn’t until much later in life that my sexual desires and expressions were able to merge with my spirituality. That’s something that the trees taught me and the seashore played out in front of me: waters enlivening, enveloping, and awakening the shore as the sands stirred within the water’s rhythm. Now I regularly experience that intertwining of sexuality and spirituality and their constancy together.

Many mystics and contemplatives have written about their love of trees and natural places. Howard Thurman wrote about the oak tree he communed with: “The tree,” he said, “would take out my bruises and my joys, unfold them, and talk about them.” And Black queer poet and activist Davelyn Hill, while navigating illness and a new diagnosis, shared, “I had a tree outside my window, and I named the tree Dolores. . . . I would stare at Dolores, I would talk to Dolores. And Dolores got me through, just thinking about her roots.”

In the early winter months of 2021, I knew I needed to reawaken this connectivity to the trees and mountains. So as soon as I could find some time in my work schedule, I took myself to the nearest mountain range. Saturated in solitude at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains, I steeped myself in a time of rituals, pauses, fires, stream listening, slowness, hiking, and paying close attention to the ways natural beauty softens me. My jaw released, my shoulders softened, my eyes calmed, and the tenderness of my truest self showed up.

On my second day in the mountains, I wandered upon an empty trail and made my way up until a tree caught my eye. Like flirty eye contact from across the room, we kept catching each other. Then I finally worked up the courage to go closer. Slowly approaching her in all her sugar-maple beauty, I eventually put my hand on her chest as if to reach her heartbeat. Then I turned around and put my back up against hers. Sliding down her spine to the ground, I felt her trunk cup my back like a chair she made just for my body. Just for me, I thought. No matter that the ground was wet, I sensed a deep belonging. Elated by the moment with her, I basked in some kind of a romance taking place between us. She spoke to me the words of affirmation I had been reciting to myself in recent days, words I longed to hear from outside myself.

You are okay, she told me.
You are good enough, you are loved, you belong, she reminded me. You will get through this. You will be okay.
Then, I felt her loving arms wrap around my waist as she

whispered what I’d been needing most: You are here, you are here, you are here. My face immediately softened even more—in the way it only does when I’m in love, when I feel safe and vulnerable, when I feel at home, when I am stilled, when I remember to be instead of do. When I recall that being is enough. I am enough and the moment is enough.

For some time longer I sat with her, embraced by her, and in the silence, I listened longer. I softened deeper and deeper into her, feeling like I was falling into her roots of wisdom. Immersed in her silent witness of the world, I accepted her love, her boughs covering me like a blanket. I considered the pathways of her roots and branches binding her to other trees, to other life, to humanity, to me, to us. She taught me to breathe deeply again in that moment of romance. She led me into the mystical encounter of love, where borders dissolve and we can sense the truth of our interconnection.

Eventually, the trail called me back. I stood up. Bowed in gratitude. Hugged and kissed her goodbye. I kissed a tree and I liked it.

Even as this wasn’t my first mystical romance with a tree, it felt brand new. The timing was healing, and the relational reciprocity allowed me to return to myself once again. That day as I headed back down the path, having said goodbye to the tree, I felt entirely renewed. Our time together had reminded me that my love of nature and my connectivity to the world around me are sustaining. The love and connection with oneself and with another can always be reawakened, renewed, and deepened. I was reminded that mystical encounter is a particular rousing of my connection to the Divine; it is erotic in the ways it points to and deepens our mutual reliance, vulnerability, trust, and love.

Mysticism as a practice, is unitive. It is also erotic in its reception, reciprocity, and expression. And if the undefinable mystical moment connects us to the erotically Divine within and around us, queerness invites us to see the ways the moment merges into unity. Queerness is the invitation to tilt our heads and see the moment’s transcendence, the encounter’s eroticism, the unitive expression––and to experience our interconnectedness.