June 2, 2024
No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. ~John Steinbeck
There’s a park in my neighborhood, Stow Grove Park, a leisurely 15 minute amble from my house. On a sun-kissed Sunday morning, the soaring redwoods catch gold in their gray-green needles, and their rusty-ocher, sweet smelling bark glimmers like copper in the sun.
A sense of silence and timelessness steals over me, as if I can feel those wise, benevolent trees reaching roots deep into Earth, branches toward the sky, sending invisible sparkling energy toward me and toward all who pass by.
I am the most fortunate of people as I tread gently along the needle-strewn path, admiring the prehistoric shape of a fungus and the prosaic, welcoming bench at the intersection of the paths.
The niggling sense of sorrow that often mars my most pleasant moments appeared in the pathway like a speaking shadow. How can I be saturated with simple enjoyment, I ask it, when you are there with your sorrow and grief? When others are homebound or body bound, unable to move easily, or at all, always on the inside looking out?
Ah, said the shadow, how do you know such beings are filled with sorrow? Your experience is not theirs. Each moment of each life, everywhere, is in accord with a pattern. The pattern is constantly shifting like the view through a kaleidoscope, but the basic structure is embodied within each life. Your life, at this moment, includes the kaleidoscope of this slice of forest. Others may choose what you perceive as struggle, but they, too, are walking in their personal Sherwood Forest, filled with wonder, their souls dancing to the music of the spheres.
*****
I didn’t perceive anything wonderful or soul-fulfilling about my struggle over the last eight years. The baseline of all my conscious moments was distilled down to I have to get rid of this pain. And I have to do it without surgery.
But from one moment to the next, last fall, something internal switched over. All right. I can get rid of this pain, I know how, and I shall. Magically, hip replacement surgery became a beckoning light rather than a dread darkness steeped in the perceived malevolence of Conventional Medicine.
Do we all have those moments of internal choice? Does everyone who I perceive as suffering, slogging through a life of daily pain or struggle, deliberately choose where they are? And hold within them the exact moment when they, too, can switch over? I can get rid of this, I know how, and I shall.
I walked past the speaking shadow, savoring the last moments in my own personal Sherwood Forest. The subtle underpinning of guilt, that I should have such joy while many others do not, shoots from me like sparks from a blacksmith’s anvil. I let the redwoods turn the guilt-sparks into light and leave the forest behind, my feet unerringly finding the path home.