The idea almost seems foreign at times in a world where relationships are built over years and are dashed in a single moment’s misjudgment.
You’d have to be a perfect person to love your enemies. But people are more vulnerable than trees.
A tree thanks you with every breath you exhale. It grows an armor of bark, made from the thankfulness of your breath, the Mother’s water, and the Father’s light.
Take a hatchet to its trunk and chip out a triangle for your doorstop. It will be hardly insulted, as you have given it life for all these years! It just stands in Thanks and offers what it can to its givers. A home for the creatures, air for the people, a conduit for the sun to the soil, a super highway for those with a voice!
The mighty oak, king of kings, will never say I forget what you’ve done for me. It will always see the true you. The willow will weep with joy, and the reed will bow in humble accord.
Nail a perfect man to a cross made of planks from it and it will still say thank you!
You have lived and it lives for you. The smallest amount of appreciation will find flowers at its every tip, and furthermore will it impress you with its scents. An equal? Never! But what could it do if you saw it as so?!
Just now, I measured the circumference of a live oak on my lunch break. Seventy inches divided by Pi and multiplied by four gives me its age. Eighty-nine years old! And, it’s the first I’ve come to, in a parking lot of all places!
Eons of wisdom woven into all habitable ground. Elders speaking to uninterested youths for ages. How discouraged have they become? Not at all.
I have only the potential to be patient, thankful, and giving!
The trees are its very essence… The original lesson… The prime example…
Lifetimes of thanks.
Are we man enough to simply say,
“You’re welcome?”
