The Trees Are Asleep

"Look," my friend said, turning his head partway toward me with his gaze on nearby trees—"the trees are asleep." He wasn’t referring to cold weather, but to the consciousness that is in everything from a stone onward, in evolution. I nodded, in response, as I liked to hear comments that moved me into the intermingling of the worldly with the spiritual.

Things that grow have given themselves to me as metaphors—helping me through difficulty with simplicity, clarity, and a novel way of peering at my life. I had years when, come January (and I lived in cold New England), I would feel such a loss of energy I would wonder if I had “sun deprivation” and needed to buy special lights to sit under. One day, an inspiration came. The tulip bulbs I’d planted among the shrubs were underground and doing what they needed—resting. I expected nothing from them until early summer. Click, went my mind. While my "bulb rest-phase" lasted a shorter period of time, I now had a new, meaningful, understandable, and accepting view of myself. With awareness of my temporary diurnal needs, I let go of thinking something was wrong.

I must have read about desert seeds. While I had driven through and had visited deserts in the Southwest, I had never lived there, so I had no knowledge of the how-to of being there. But they became a major influence on my thinking with this news about how things grow: some seeds there take seven years to bloom. How amazing could a revelation be—and how influencing. If desert seeds, then why not me? There were simply some achievements that would need a different timetable in my life.

My realization is, "Nature offers teaching."