A tree spends it's entire life doing one thing
Reaching for the light.
How much time do we spend fooling around with darkness?
How many Stephen King novels have we read?
A tree lives in perfect symbiosis with it's environment-absorbing carbon dioxide and giving off life giving oxygen.
What have we given back to our environment?
A tree knows to let go of its leaves in the fall so that the trunk can have all the water when winter comes and the ground is frozen and water is unavailable. How many resentments do we hold on to despite the fact that they may be killing us?
A tree knows that it must ground itself firmly through its root system in order to grow to its greatest height.
How often do we feel rootless, how close are we in consciousness to the earth?
The word "humble" comes from the word "humus" that means "earth". Thus the more humble we are, the more capable of growth.
Trees give food and shelter to countless species of insects, birds, and mammals. How many species do we nurture and shelter? How many have we destroyed?
One last thing:
Oxygen is a waste product of photosynthesis. When we see a horde of flies feasting on a lump of shit, we think that's disgusting. "How can they eat that shit?" I wonder if trees have the same judgement about what we take into our lungs? Oxygen is tree farts. We're inhaling TREE FARTS!
In the late 50's and early 60's there were a number of movies depicting the horrors of giant insects turned loose on the human population. Movies such as "Them" "Monster From Green Hell" and "Tarantula" are classic examples of the genre' known as giant insect movies. Now I realize we were just projecting. What was really going on was that we were invading and destroying their nests and habitats in exactly the same fashion as we feared them doing it to us! WE ARE THE GIANT INSECTS WE ALWAYS FEARED.
In my neck of the woods, the sparrow is the most common of all birds. I see dozens of them in my backyard feasting on the seeds we've put out for them each morning. Sometimes there are so many of them, they look like a moving blanket of brown and gray covering our tiny yard.
One day, when my wife and I were going about our daily rituals, we heard a strange sound coming from our fireplace-a soft thumping accompanied by a fluttering sound. One of our backyard sparrows had gotten itself trapped inside our fireplace. She was flying repeatedly into the closed glass doors trying to find her freedom again. We didn't know quite what to do for her at the time and my wife had to go to work, so the welfare of this little creature was left to me.
I had a busy morning. There were lots of phone calls to make and Emails to respond to, so my attention to the plight of this little bird was intermittent at best. But any time there was a break in the action, I’d go back to figuring out how to free this creature from its dark narrow prison.
A couple of times I opened the glass doors and tried to scare her back up the chimney. When she didn't appear for a while, I thought maybe I'd succeeded, but then I'd hear that thumping again, only now it was accompanied by panicked chirps. What the hell could I do for her? If I open the doors and try to scare her back the way she came, then she just flies up a little way and hides in the damper. If I let her stay there, she'll just stay trapped. Meanwhile, my cat discovered the presence of this hapless creature and was going nuts trying to get at her.
Finally the phone rang. It was my wife. She said she had the answer.” Open all the doors and windows and lock the cat in the basement. The bird'll come out, smell the fresh air and head for the nearest opening.” Like a good husband, I did just as she said. This was in the dead of winter, of course, and it was lunch time, so I sat on the couch in my heavy coat, ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, turned on Comedy Central and hoped for the best. When a commercial came on, I took my plate into the kitchen and as I returned to the living room, I saw the sparrow hopping across the floor. I immediately made a dive for the space behind it trying to drive it toward the front door. I made a few attempts at catching it, but I'm not much of a sparrow wrangler and she easily alluded me. Finally, I got her to the vestibule and when I lunged for her again, she flew straight out the door, across my porch and on to my front lawn. I raised my fists into the air like Rocky for a couple of seconds and pulled the front door closed before anything else could get in or out.
Then I looked back at the dark narrow ash filled prison from which she had just escaped. I’d been practicing a Tibetan Buddhist form of meditation that instructs us to breathe in a texture of darkness, narrowness and claustrophobia. This is to help us to drop our resistance to these unpleasant sensations. I realized that for that sparrow our fireplace was a perfect physical realization of that choking confining darkness. The second step of the meditation is to breathe this in for all the people of the world who feel trapped and scared. Finally, we were taught to breathe out a sense of brightness and spaciousness to all these people with the wish that they may be free. I’ve been doing this form of meditation for over a year now and sometimes I'd get discouraged. I didn't know how much good it was doing toward healing this insane world. But when I saw that sparrow fly out of my front door and glide down to my snow covered lawn, I took it as a sign. God was letting me know that I was making my little contribution to mankind's liberation from darkness and suffering. I felt like I used to feel as a kid when on some rare occasion my dad would wink at me to let me know I was doing ok, that I was on the right track. I smiled feeling a warmth and reassurance inside while listening to the faint but exquisitely beautiful songs of the sparrows outside.
Laying on the earth after an intense rainstorm the night before.
A brisk Northwest wind whisks brilliant white clouds across a crystal blue sky. They move so freely, so quickly I get the sense that the whole weather system in Northeast Ohio has purged itself of toxins and cleansed itself.
The air is so fresh and brisk I want my internal weather system to work that way too.
When I'm feeling a resentment that I won't let go of, I want my soul to imitate the sky. I want to shout out my pain like thunder, rain tears to release whatever hurt is there, then let the resentment go flying across and out of my consciousness like a cloud across a windswept sky.
And when there's a fear I won't let go of 'cause I'm so sure it's important to worry about that thing, I want to let that worry pass over me like a shadow of a passing cloud, let it pass by 'til there's sunshine in me again, not chase after the cloud so I can stay in it's shadow. Just let it flit by like any cloud, until it's out of my consciousness.
Emotions that we won't let go of are like a stagnant air mass over a city. They end up poisoning and choking us. Emotions are meant to move through us like air masses through regions of the earth.
What's good for the outside is good for the inside too.
I've heard it said that we don't care
That's just plain wrong
Of course we care
We care about our guns more that the safety of our children
We care about stadiums more than schools
We care about our cars more that clean air
We care about our cars more that clean water
We care about our cars more that our forests
We care about factories more than fish
We care about money more than marriages
We care about property more than people
We care about comfort more than connection
We care about comfort more than truth
In fact we care about our comfort more than we do the whole damn planet
So how can you possibly say that WE DON'T CARE?!!!