Watching Trees . . .

Things have been pretty surreal for me lately. A lot less of the artistic and creative juices have been flowing and more of the problem solving and drama resisting juices have been gushing. Last Sunday (this one that had just passed, not the one before it), I'd just had enough and decided that after a breakfast of pancakes with Riley and black coffee for myself, I'd needed some time to unwind.

My little girl, bless her heart, wanted to ride her bike. I however, had a headache and was not choosing to lug a bike up and down basement stairs, nor was I in any sort of mood to remind her to wear a helmet or keep and eye on her to give her some of the finer points of riding her two wheeled choice of Sunday morning entertainment. It would have seemed that fate was on my side that day.

As luck would have it, her tires were in need of some air, and I was without an air pump. Our neighbors, both on the second and first floors were not home, so that ruled out the option of borrowing one from either of them.

Our only other option was to play in the back yard and enjoy both each other's company, and mother nature (oddly enough, a Tim Horton's drive through is on the other side of our backyard fence and the main road is in front of said donut proprietor).
As Riley clambored over the swing set that morning, riding the glider then the swings, climbing the ladders and wrestling me on the lawn, I'd laid on my back and was treated to a show.

Breathing slowly, watching the wind work its way through the branches of that tree in our backyard, with the cyan sky above as its backdrop, I became relaxed. I began to notice a very fluid and natural pattern. As if the branches were at once both a part of nature and separate from it in themselves. Riding each gust and fluidly moving up and down, swaying in unison and at points, in chaos with one another.

It became less of a relaxation opportunity for me and more of a life lesson in reality. It was odd, but I began to almost work out and understand how people and the universe work.

What I'd worked out became a thought something akin to this;
Everything that we know is essentially a part of one another. This planet, the Universe, the stars, the grass that was under me, the ants on my legs, all of it.
It would seem rude, selfish and very self important to think other wise. It'd be as if my spleen, a part of me, began to think that it was separate and wanted to figure out the rest of me. In that we are all apart of a contained reality that is both known and unknown, it should be accepted that we all work in unison as one very large, as well as microscopic biological machine that supports itself and destroys itself at the same time.
Its the ultimate definition of balance and harmony. Picture a mess that cleans up after itself. Taoism that presents itself on a daily basis. A Universe, a Galaxy, a Solar System, all of it, working both independently and together to achieve both a desired and natural result. It works within natural laws and chaotic events, from an amoeba to the Milky Way.
It lends credence to evolution and Eastern religious philosophies all at the same time. I know it sounds insane, and that this is just rambling, but let's go back to the tree, shall we?

While relaxing, each time the wind blew, I'd noticed that the branches, each an individual part of the tree, worked together at times in the wind, other times against one another. Replace those branches with people. We work with one another at times, overcoming natural phenomena or situations, other times and most times, we work against one another for our own personal interests.
This philosophy can also hold true for a person's cells, or animals in an ecosystem, or for ecosystems and environments themselves.

Naturally, these things all work on their own individual time frames, being relative to their size and nature, but the theory and idea holds sound for all of it.

It means that there will be times where things work with me and things work against me, good times and bad times, up and down. The choice is truly up to me to either accept these things; these times and work with them, go with them, or fight against them, swim upstream and feel the agony, stress and pain of working against the nature of these events and people around me.

It lead me back to my hard drive and this picture that I'd worked on a while back. Something I planned on using for a pulp story intro to my 'Skies Over Gutenberg' ongoing fiasco that I keep putting off. It lead me to love lying o n my back on a Sunday afternoon, and listening to the sounds of traffic and donut house speaker boxes as my five year old little girl laughed and played in the back yard.

I still smile when I think of those branches moving. They give me a little bit of hope in my future.