The Thought Of Life
There is an apple tree in my backyard. Three or four times every autumn I fill my yard waste bin with hundreds of fallen apples. I do not consider this wasteful. The apples keep coming and coming and coming. The squirrels miss them, I guess, but there are always the acorns from the oak tree in my front yard. Each of those apples is filled with seeds, and each seed is capable, with enough luck, of becoming a tree itself. The tree creates the fruit to drop the fruit to make more trees. I can’t imagine the apple tree, if it were capable, would miss those apples once she’d dropped them. The tree wouldn’t, because the tree only desires to make more trees. In this way, the loss of the apple is the apple tree’s potential gain.
When I am feeling stuck with anything I am writing, I often notice a miserliness to my thinking. Circling around my heart is the question of what will come to me with this out-pouring of energy? What will I get that I don’t already have? This kind of thinking never leads me to anything I want to share. Instead, it only leads me to cleverness I hope some poor editor will be fooled into paying me for.
I cannot imagine I am less equipped than an apple tree. I cannot image that I somehow need more than I already have, and so must exchange my energy to fill this hole in my life. If this were the equation, I would live in a constant state of deprivation, for I would have to lose one thing to gain another, and so remain as deficient as before.
Within me is the potential for all the seeds of thought I will ever dream to share. When I share them, it is not to hand someone something they do not already have; rather, I am awakening within them what they had already known but which had been buried below their operative conscience, just as that thought was once buried within mine. When I remember that life is only a continuous awakening, not a journey of acquisition, I remember that I already have what I need, that I am in fact just like that tree, desiring only to spread the thought of life.
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