Podcast Episode: Wisdom of a Cherry Tree

Pip: If you have ever walked past a cherry tree and thought, nice fruit, moving on — Dippack Mistri is here to suggest you missed the entire sermon.

Mara: That is exactly the territory this episode covers — one tree, one garden, and what a season of blooming, feeding, and bare winter branches has to say about wisdom, reverence, and the nature of the self.

Pip: Let’s start with the tree itself.

Wisdom of a Cherry Tree

Mara: The post opens with a claim from the Puranas — that trees deserve the care we give family — and then pushes further, arguing that fruit trees like this cherry should be revered as silent sages.

Pip: And to make that case, the post draws on a biography of Ramana Maharshi, where the saint rebukes workers for beating a mango tree to knock down its fruit. The quote lands hard: “In return for giving us fruit, is the tree to be beaten with sticks? Who gave you this work? Instead of beating the tree, you might as well cut it to the roots.”

Mara: What that moment does is reframe the tree as something with a claim on our conscience. Ramana’s anger is not sentimental — it is moral. The tree gives fruit; we respond with sticks. The asymmetry is the point.

Pip: The post then follows the cherry tree through a full year — blossoms drawing bees in spring, blackbirds singing what the writer calls bhajans at dawn, cherries ripening and feeding starlings, fledglings, wasps, worms, hedgehogs, moles, and one human who takes a plateful and calls it copyright.

Mara: That inventory is deliberate. The tree feeds and shelters murderer and sage alike, the post says — it does not discriminate. And when autumn comes and the fruit falls and rots, it fertilizes the ground. The tree is, in the writer’s phrase, self-sufficient.

Pip: The rot feeds the worms. The worms feed the woodpeckers. The human rakes it away so as not to foul the grass. The comedy writes itself, and yet the point is earnest.

Mara: It is. The post closes with a quote from S. S. Cohen on Ramana Maharshi — “your equal vision towards one and all, even towards stray animals” — and draws the parallel directly. The cherry’s fruit is what it shares. Ramana’s fruit was the question “Who Am I.”

Pip: One tree, one question, same ashram. The winter strips the branches bare, and the post ends there — unmoved, it says, the tree remains unmoved. Which is, apparently, the whole lesson.

Mara: And it raises a question the post leaves open: what does it take to develop what the writer calls the eye of wisdom — the capacity to actually see what the tree is showing?

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Pip: Reverence for what quietly feeds everyone and asks nothing back — that is a thread worth pulling.

Mara: The cherry tree is still there, in the garden, waiting for spring. So, presumably, is the next installment.