This morning just before  sunrise I looked out of the back window of the house where the crabapple tree arches over the house. My attention was riveted on a single crabapple and how it hung by a thin stem onto the sleeping tree. How it stayed there by a tiny thread. It moved me. “Why?”  I asked myself.

I then traced the line of connection from the crabapple, down the twig, the small branch, the large branch, the trunk, and into the roots. The answer came that I was moved because of the connection, the absence of separation between the crabapple and the roots. I felt this connection in myself, in my heart.

When I resolve to hold onto this connectedness, this oneness, I have the strength of my own heart and I can live my life from the heart. I can bear the pain that comes my way without projecting it out onto the “other,” in order to avoid feeling it.

The reward? Self possession. An awakened heart.

Thank you, dear crabapple tree.

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/jurassic-bark-ancient-irish-trees-brought-back-to-life-1.1971695

http://www.woodlandleague.org/

I feel at last the world’s reality

Which, lacking the communion of my soul,

Would in itself be frosty, empty life,

And showing itself powerless

To recreate itself in souls,

Would in itself find only death.

–Rudolf Steiner

There are places inside me where the soothing balm of rest has never penetrated. I long for a small respite from the reaching, a moment of sweet stillness, quiet darkness, the great silence that can penetrate and loosen the small, hard knots of endless trying. I want to be willing and able to move only as fast as I am capable of moving while still remaining connected to the impulse to move from deep within, stopping when I have lost that slender thread of desire and having the courage and faith to wait, in stillness, until I find it again.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

A Poem on Hope

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there’s the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
of the future, which surely will surprise us,
and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
anymore than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.

Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields, eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains, overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it, as you care for no other place, this
knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth.
It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask
for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land
and your work.  Be still and listen to the voices that belong
to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields.

Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.
The world is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.

–Wendell Berry

By Wendell Berry

I feel my own force, bearing fruit

And gaining strength to give me to the world.

My inmost being I feel charged with power

To turn with clearer insight

Toward the weaving of life’s destiny.

— Rudolf Steiner

When I looked up at the web of trees, the night fell over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark.

— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

Our own life has to be our message.
― Thich Nhat Hanh