from The Light Tree Journal: Part One: "The Way of Trees..." and the way of Life...

    There was River running through Everland, which was so clear and sparklingly beautiful it would gladden the heart of anyone who saw it. In a lovely open place through which it flowed, after it left the hills were deciduous trees growing, along both its sides, and they were wild fruit trees; and they were in full flower in their pink dreaming.
   It was a very bright sunlit day, with a strongish wind blowing and my heart was soaring within me. As I walked beside the River, set free of every encumbrance, I saw the wind in the trees. I saw how it moved them. And I was fascinated. I went more slowly, and gazed upward. Some of the trees, the more supple ones, were moving so urgently it seemed as if they spoke; or that they had in them even a burning story to tell. Filled also with a longing to communicate, my arms then lifted of themselves and raised were waving as a tree. I was a tree! My swaying branches signing to a deaf world hell bent upon its own destruction, ‘Copy me! See the trees! Life has turned us inside out! And sent us in, another way!’  
   Oh, the trees knew. And they were bidding me copy them. They knew my eyes would open ‘waving’ in another direction. Constantly they were changing with the times. Only human nature thinks it knows better and inside stays the same.   The season changed. I was in another place. And as so often happens in the course of my sojourn on the Earth, a month of somberness came when my awareness of the continual Presence within was waning; seemingly, being taken away? Being proved, perhaps? But for good, I learned later! That it may grow even stronger. And that is hard! ...Of course it is hard, I realized. But that is only because I am ignorant! Having not previously taken much notice of the way of living things, nor learned from them how that life is continually changing its form; and sometimes so slowly I do not see it at all. Like how mothers cannot tell the day when their babes became toddlers, and as schoolchildren walked each day from home until they finally left it for their own. Though we stared at them every day, they every day looked the same to us. But they were not. They were each day changing. Yet so normal was it we didn’t notice the change. Nor could we pin it down when it was. Nor did we cry for the loss: we didn’t see it. Something new was always there to take its place.
   Oh! Like the seasons of fruit trees! And then I remembered that happy day, when borne by the wind I had walked among the trees along the River of Life in my faraway land. Suddenly I understood more of what it was that they had been trying to tell me that day. Of course, however sweet the blossom of their springtime, they do not cling to it, and cry at its loss! They know their beauty must fall away for the fruit to form. All this was the way of real life! And as it was true in the natural, so is it in the spiritual.
   Oh, and then I saw, to my rue, I am not as wise as a tree! Having not learned of them, that in my own life, the lovely blossoms of my ‘first light and life,’ will drop away! As they are meant to! And for something greater than showy blossom! Some further life in me! The living fruit of inner truth and wisdom, in which is the continuing seed of endless life. Growing, maturing, falling – and dying, down in the dark – and then living, up in the light!
   Oh, it is in the awakening! In an inner life such as the living world of nature knows all around me, changing with the times, and me with it – that is how I will be as a fruitful ‘tree;’ and bring forth a harvest!
   No falling: no springing up! No endings no new beginnings! I had been unobservant, I had not applied this free and living knowledge, to my own life: to perceive and comprehend the Way of All Life; and the manner in which it will change, and there was joy!

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