I love the forest and the lessons I learn from living in it. I spent my childhood in a forest, and I've been observing the forest here at Earthsprings for twenty years. Every morning walk reveals some new insight.

       This morning, for example, I walked along, listening to crows "Caw" their warnings, hawks cry their high pitched, rapturous "Kkkeeee," and cardinals compliment each other with their "Pretty, Pretty!" song. I stopped for awhile, sat on a log, watched a deer suddenly angle its long neck high up to watch me back. I felt the rich,

God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.                                                                                                          --Meister Eckhart

diverse life of this place. Then I walked on, pausing to move a few downed tree limbs out of my path. After that, I began to think about dead tree limbs dropping off, quite naturally, from healthy, living trees. That turned into quite a meditation.               

       The forest here is dense. The trees, so close together, shoot upward to seek more of a share of the sunlight. Leaves on a tree's top limbs proliferate, soaking up the sunlight and spreading to form a canopy that gradually shades out the tree's lower limbs. Since the lower limbs can no longer serve the limbing function, they dry up and fall off the tree. This happens all the time, year round. It doesn't hurt the tree at all. It actually helps, since there's no more "dead weight" for the tree to deal with.

       As I thought about all this, it translated into a metaphor for life. How important it is to know that it's quite natural and healthy for some things to fall away from us when they are no longer necessary or useful, and such letting go doesn't have to hurt at all. It was so easy to see that while I was looking up at a healthy tree from which dead limbs had fallen, a tree still green and strong, swaying slightly there in the wind. Even though limbs had dropped off, that tree was going right on, continuing to provide shelter for birds and squirrels and other critters, making oxygen for the planet as well as food for lots of types of life, and simply being beautiful and holy in its own right to be, just for itself.

All shapes are worn thin by the working of time; they age, sicken, crumble to dust-- unless they change. But change they can, for the invisible spark that generated them is potent enough for infinite change.                                                                                                                    --Carl Jung

       Am I like that tree? Can I be? Letting go with ease when it's time? Maybe I'm too aware of the dangers down below when limbs do fall. Here at Earthsprings big dead limbs can fall from fifty feet up in the air. That can create quite a whammy when they hit some plant or animal or house that happens to be underneath. A dead tree limb can fall inadvertently onto another healthy tree, damaging the healthy one in the process. When I hear the crack of a limb breaking off, I automatically take cover like a pedestrian on a big city street when a car backfires. I caution tent campers not to pitch their tents or park their vehicles under trees with dead limbs overhead.

       We are wise if we pay similar attention to the people around us. People change. They let go of things in their lives, and sometimes that can take us by surprise, even hurt us if we are not prepared. For example, a job change and a move to another city may be right timing for a parent and difficult for a child. A person may go to counseling to work through to a new level of consciousness, to let go of some old business, only to find that other people in his or her life react negatively to this new person they have to deal with.

       Sometimes all that is unavoidable, as it is in any forest, where healthy trees get damaged all the time. Tricky business, but it all can work out. Most healthy trees that get bent over by another tree's falling limbs nonetheless continue to grow, taking on a new shape to be sure, but still reaching for the light. One of my favorites at Earthsprings was so knocked over years ago that it is still, for about fifteen feet, horizontal to the ground at about a foot from the earth's surface; out of this awkward posture, it has sent numerous healthy shoots upright all along its still horizontal trunk! It's a great teaching tree for me. I go stand by it when I get "bent out of shape" about something.

The truth is--for every one of us--that there is no way to avoid the trauma of loss if we love even a little. This is what makes the task of learning to handle grief so important...No one sows and reaps in the same day, so learning how to lose creatively is not something we can afford to postpone.                                                                                                              --John Claypool

       Tree limbs can also be so wrapped up in vines that when a dead limb breaks loose it simply dangles in midair, suspended by the tangled vines. Such limbs are referred to by East Texans as "widow makers" because sometimes someone is walking along, all unsuspecting, when the vines finally break and a limb falls right on them.

       Many people have psychic widow makers--a lot of entangling "hang ups" of dead wood, suspended somewhere, broken off from consciousness, no longer useful, but not quite fallen away, tangled up in some psychic complex. How often I've said to myself, after I've been unexpectedly knocked for a loop, "I thought I was done with that!" And too, I've had someone else say to me about something, "Why did you hit me with that; that's from your old life, and it has nothing to with me or where we are now." Psychic widow makers.

       If you walk through a forest, decide arbitrarily that some limb should come off because you think it's usefulness is over or it is in the way, and you break it off prematurely before the limb is ready to drop away, before it dries out completely, well, then you can damage the tree. Sometimes you can kill a tree that way; disease gets into the raw wound that is left when the healthy limb is broken off. That kind of forced letting go is a very different proposition than the natural dropping away of limbs. When I have to prune healthy tree limbs, I "doctor" the tree with the right kind of goop to seal over the wound to the tree so that it can recover. Likewise, we humans have to be "doctored" when we get wounded by losing something vital to us before we are ready for this to occur. Grief is usually a part of this process.

       After my mother's death, I had the responsibility to decide what to do with her old house. My sister, who had lived either with or very close to my mother for all her life, had been there to watch my mother's decline. She had had to take care of the old house as it too declined. It was a lot of work, and when my mother passed on, my sister was ready right away to get rid of the old house and move on. For her, that "limb" that had been her time in our childhood home was already "dried up," and she had no problem letting go of the old house. I, on the other hand, had lived four states away, visiting once or twice a year, and I was still attached to the notion of the old house as my primal home. I wasn't about to let go of that comfort right after my mother's death. It took me five years of dealing with it, taking responsibility for maintenance, renting, repairing, etc., before I could know it was finally time to sell the place. When I did, there was almost no bad feeling about it. By then, that psychic"limb" had naturally dried up and was ready to fall. If someone had made me sell the house immediately after my mother's death, I would have suffered.

The One from whom comes the "good old days" can be trusted to provide good             new days.                                                                              --John Claypool

       There are differences in personality in this regard. I notice in the autumn that there are some species of trees whose leaves turn brown and drop off early in the fall; other tree species' leaves may turn brown, but they don't fall off for the longest time. Some trees will cling to those dead leaves all the way into spring, when the new green leaves finally have to push the old leaves away to make room for the new growth. Similarly, some people let go easily, some people cling to things a long time. We don't say one tree species is better than another or more right than another because of their differences. Perhaps we should apply the same non-judgmental attitude to those of our own species who vary in their abilities to let go.

       Even if we think a limb is dead, if it hasn't fallen off yet, there can be trouble in breaking it off. When my daughters grew up and were ready to leave home, I thought I was ready. I'd prepared for it long before they were born, reading Gibran's words, "Your children are not your children, they are the children of the Universe; they come through you, but not of you..." etc. I had also read of the tradition somewhere in India where every year on the anniversary of the child's birth, the mother goes to the temple and leaves an offering, each year a bigger offering, until the year when the child reaches the age of maturity, at which point the mother takes the child/adult and leaves him or her at the temple. Letting go. I knew all about that. I practiced for it in my head. One of my daughters was even wise enough to say to me that the reason Mother Nature arranged for adolescence to be so difficult was that when it was time for the kid to leave home, both parent and child would be glad of it! But I'm the kind of tree that clings to those brown leaves all the way into spring, so letting go took awhile.

       As for the dead tree limbs that fall to the ground, they serve many good functions. New life comes out of the changes. After my daughters left home I've had the joy of seeing them do their own thing: one becomes a doctor, one travels the world, there are now grandchildren, etc.

       Though East Texas is not a rain forest, we do have "nurse logs" here too, those big downed limbs or logs out of which another tree sprouts even before the dead one decomposes. Life can be eager in the forest. And in our psyches as well, new life often emerges quickly when we finally let go of old stuff.

Looking back on the history of "knowledge," it becomes clear that it changes every century and is different in each civilization. Still, most people believe that what they know about the world is true. For example people once knew that the world was flat, that the sun went around the earth, and that space was fixed and absolute and filled with something called "ether."...In spite of being "wrong," many ideas seem to have worked just fine for the people who knew them to be true...In this late age of civilization, as our previous myths and religions grow old, science has arisen to take their place, offering new names for the same old cloud of unanswered questions. The new scientific paradigm presents a shimmering, unknowable reality full of mysterious quarks and pions and gluons and antiprotons and strong and weak forces, leaving us, in the end, with uncertainty, except for the probability that we still don't know anything...the moral is that it is time to slow down and relax, to learn less of doing and more of being. Given the brevity of our existence and the fact that we don't know what it means or what we are supposed to be doing here, perhaps our only recourse is to learn how to be in the moment with what is before us.                          --Wes Nisker

       I also see dry dead tree limbs that have fallen helter-skelter stack up on the forest floor, getting quickly overrun with other kinds of vegetation. The rotting limbs become hidden under layers of sprawling green briars, berry and grape vines, ferns and honeysuckle and poison ivy, dead leaves and pine needles . Little animals find homes in such mounds of stuff in varying stages of coming and going into and out of active life.

       Likewise, in our psyches, so much is at once rank and wild and sprouting and decaying and disorderly. So much is mysteriously hidden and inexplicable. If we are too judgmental and try too hard to clean up and order everything, to turn that wild forest and that mess of debris into a tailored, pruned, manicured place, we may lose touch with some organic essence vital to our well being.

       We may not know why there's a mound of limbs and briars and mulch there in our mindscape. We may not know what lives and thrives there. Snakes or scorpions or other threatening things might be under those dead logs, to be sure, but for all we know, a rare wild orchid or a special medicinal plant may emerge from an ugly mound of stuff. Bull nettles might grow up there to sting us every time we touch them, or we may one day gather from those tangling vines that are ensnaring everything muscadine grapes, so cool and tart and sweet and delicious when plucked and popped all purple and juicy in our mouths on an August afternoon. Everything serves in its own way, if given the chance. Snakes eat rats, thus preventing our being overrun by too many of those disease-bearing creatures. Ants help the composting process, taking anything on the ground back down to dirt, even rocks!

        And so it is in our own psyches. Even those things that we don't like, that we have to endure, or let be, or let go of, that don't seem so noble or lovely, those twisted limbs that aren't necessarily good memories, those rotten, dead, ugly things that are inconvenient or embarrassing--these too can serve somehow.

        So we may learn to be in right relation to it all, to have an ecological outlook. We may trust life's process itself sometimes. We may come to know that the forest is just foresting and our psyches are just psychic.

        Some downed tree limbs are host to what is called "resurrection fern," a small fern that lives on tree limbs and continues to live and grow there even when a limb falls to the ground. I've seen resurrection ferns grow on downed limbs for years. Sometimes in a dry spell, I'll notice that a fern has "browned out" so that I think it's dead, but no, as soon as there's rain, the fern greens right back again and here it goes, resurrected, ferning along for years on that fallen dead limb.

        Buddhists are kind of like resurrection ferns. If you don't get attached to certain ideas or images or people or ways of life or whatever, you don't have to suffer when it changes, when it falls away; you just keep on "ferning." I like that principle, and it comes and goes with me.

       There's some resurrection fern on a little downed limb in the area that I mow. I take the trouble to get off the riding mower to move it back and forth out of the way of the mowing just because I love the beauty of it and the symbol of it. It is finally getting so rotted that it's crumbly when I pick it up, but I mutter my love for it every time, all the same.

        An old timer told me once that any time you see resurrection fern growing on a living tree it means the tree is dying already. But there is a native pecan tree here that has had that fern growing on it at least ever since I have been coming here, and though limbs drop off from time to time, and though I wait anxiously every spring to be sure that there are new green leaves on the old tree, it goes right on living. This is sometimes true for humans, too, who live for many years after diagnoses of cancer or Aids or whatever.

       That old tree won't go on forever; I know that. Not only do limbs fall when they are finished, the whole tree falls, finally. But the life of the tree species continues, even if one tree falls away. So every time I see resurrection fern growing somewhere, I go into my sort of mystic trance, feeling uplifted, enlightened, enlivened in some essential part of me.

       Lastly, today I was reminded of the larger meaning of the process whereby the living tree's reaching for more light is the cause of the browning out of the lower limbs in the first place. It doesn't mean that the lower limbs were never useful or right for the tree. It's just that the tree outgrew that stage. The top limbs wouldn't be there if the bottom ones hadn't been there first.

       In the process of ongoing "enlightenment," we too outgrow certain stages of spiritual or emotional development. I remember once hearing an Episcopal bishop, Bishop Pike, say that he had outgrown certain stages in his spiritual development. In some ways, he said, he was like a "church alumnus." Like someone who goes first to kindergarten, then to elementary school, then to high school, then to college, then to graduate school, then into the next "school" of life, the person moves appropriately through these stages and outgrows them. Just because you are in college does not mean that what they teach or you learned in elementary school is wrong, irrelevant or to be disdained. It's just that you have a broader perspective now, and you can encompass a greater breadth of awareness and understanding. It is just a natural process of growth.

As I said in the beginning, I love the forest and the lessons I learn from living in it. The forest is lovely, dense and deep. It is incredibly abuzz with the richest diversity of life. As this excerpt from a long poem I once wrote called "The Way I Talked When I Was a Kid" says, it's like this:

Back there in East Texas
in them woods and swamps and thickets
I used to talk different than I do now.
Think different too.
Now I ponder serious stuff--
operas an' war an' political polls an' DNA.
Back then I was, at times,
as fine an' simple
as an old flat head,
axe over his shoulder
whis'lin' a tune an' quick steppin'
home to a supper o' rice and beans.
Back then I thought, often enough,
about stuff not serious.
Leaves, an' rain, an' cloud shapes,
an' squirrels, an' hopping frogs, an' snakes
(I was scared to death of snakes!)
an' insects. Did you ever notice
how many insects there are?
An' all of Îem chattering an' squeekin'
an' chirpin' all at once together
in that rich brown leafy mold
under a dead crumblin' tree log,
or down in the fine green ferns,
or in the black bog of the old slough.
All of them insects talkin' together
sounds like the creaking of the Universe,
or the heartbeats of a million little gods..."

       I am grateful for the forest and for the opportunity to live in it and share it with others. Perhaps when you come to visit here, for retreat or sabbatical or for a few days of rest and renewal, you will find your own metaphors and new meaning for your life by being immersed in nature and observing her wonders. Or perhaps you'll just enjoy it for itself, as I usually do.

       I send you now my morning meditation on tree limbs because you, like the forest, matter to me. I love to have your feedback, so let me hear from you. As always, you are in my prayers.

                                                                                                                                         --Glenda Taylor

We stand on the peak of the consciousness of previous ages, and their wisdom is available to us. History--that selective treasure house of the past which each age bequeaths to those that follow--has formed us in the present so that we may embrace the future. What does it matter if our insights, the new forms which play around the fringes of our minds, always lead us into virginal land where, like it or not, we stand on strange and bewildering ground? The only way out is ahead, and our choice is whether we shall cringe from it or affirm it. For in every act of love and will--and in the long run they are both present in each genuine act--we mold ourselves and our world simultaneously. This is what it means to embrace the future.                     --Rollo May

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