While vacationing in Puerto Rico, we stopped at a 375-year-old kapok tree. Kapok is the cottony stuffing used in meditation cushions.
The roots of the kapok trees are tall buttresses from which other sprouts develop into trees. This tree is well-rooted!
These buttress roots give me an whole new image regarding the verse on the 8 Vicissitudes.
Pleasure and pain,
Gain and loss,
Praise and blame,
Fame and disrepute
come and go like the wind.
Stand like a great [kapok] tree in the midst of them all.
Or sit on your kapok meditation cushion in the midst of it all.