Fourth Form of Madness

A few years after we built our house, I had a tree planted in the front yard. The council was offering a free tree and I have always been of the persuasion that a big, shady tree in the front yard completes the perfect archetypical house.  Over the years the tree has grown against all kinds of adversities, i.e., broken sprinklers, people snapping branches off it and my cat using it as a scratching post. It has stood there in all kinds of weather, silent and resilient throughout everything, come what may.

Recently I have had more time for myself due certain turns in life that must come about if we are ever to sit and just contemplate ourselves and this precarious predicament called living that into we often fall.  In this time, I have found myself just sitting for healthy lengths of time just admiring and softly watching the tree.  There is nothing like the gentle whisper of nature and all her mysteries to calm an anxious soul.  During these times of quiet contemplation with the tree, I have really been swept away with the most basic yet enduring and hypnotic innate beauty of her.  Sure if you look at the individual parts that make up the tree, nothing overly beautiful leaps out at you. A few branches look like they are dying, she is growing a tiny bit crooked.  But viewed in all it’s totality, with all the parts making up the whole, there is a heart breaking beauty that could not possibly escape anyone’s senses.  In fact, I would go as far to say that even a blind person could see this kind of beauty, this form of beauty.  Totality and wholeness has a language that seems to be heard at the cellular level rather than sensical.

So as I sit with a cup of tea and some soft piano music playing the background, I watch the beautiful embodiment of nature sway gently in the afternoon breeze.  Swaying back and forth to the natural rhythm of life against the backdrop of the ever present blueness of the wide open sky and I give thanks for this unspoken conversation we are having and how it informs my very being.