Wood wisdom

Another visit home - just two days this time and after three days of incredibly hot weather that seems to have killed some of my little trees. That is saddening, but the big trees remain and I went to sit with Kairos.

This was purely a matter of being there. Not seeking some kind of point or aiming at some kind of telos. This sense of letting go of the idea of "one thing" of an "ultimate purpose" or goal or ambition seems to be feeling increasingly right. Those images of being drawn into the earth, of following the roots downward... I think there is a need to find my groundedness.. Yes, and that journey in which the woman said, "You are sprung-born." I feel the need to discover an origin rather than chart a path. Yes.

There is a poem which seems to express this rather well, Ruth Padel's "The Emerald Tablet".

It was so quiet. The birds seem to be hiding. This is late June, as I write, and it seems too early for them to be moulting? I guess that with mates long established and the exhaustion of parenting taking its toll, there is little time for singing.

The following day I sat with the Wayfarer Oak. As I seemed to be waiting for something to happen, the tree said, "It is always already happening." That I accepted to be true. Life and death, pleasure and pain, growth and decline, eating and shitting, all there, right there, right then.

Watching that lame sheep - and she was not alone, there was a lamb who struggled to walk and various others favouring a leg, hurt my heart. Doesn't anyone care? The tree said, "People think trees don't have feelings, but it pains me when anyone near me is in pain."

I asked how that felt and the Oak said, "I wish I could stop the pain, all the pain. If I could I would. Your pain, too." And I had a realisation: SOUL is the part that feels the heartfelt yearning "May all beings be well; may all beings be happy" and also the part that feels the inconsolable pain that it is not and cannot be so.