 “THE BLESSING TREE”© Copyright 9-26-2005 By Dana Shino, The Purple Phoenix, LLC www.thepurplephoenix.com For Linda who introduced me to the Blessing Tree and for the employees at Brown and Brown who still walk beneath it everyday. If you stand near a tree, quiet your mind and lean in with stillness, you can hear a tree’s thoughts. Just beyond its thoughts, you can feel its heart beating underneath the bark. And its breath, a breeze, will rush along your skin and send tingles up your spine like Martin Luther King Jr. hailing his dreams as if for the first time. If you lean against a tree and suspend your desires long enough, a tree will tell you its secrets like Mahalia Jackson singing musky baritones about a baby Jesus come new to the world. A tree will regale you with ancient secrets embroidered in Celtic runes, decorated elaborately with wood nymphs and faeries, and fringed with first hand accounts of the saints. And just when you lose yourself in a tree’s trail of ancient lore, it will reel off a Dizzy Gillespie riff, proudly announcing its number of tree rings, how tall it stands and how many leaves dresses it. A tree will introduce you to the squirrels who come and go (who will promptly ask you for nuts), the birds who live there and how deep its roots are. All of this is quite special... quite special indeed. However, it is not all. For in every tree lives a being— a Tree Keeper, if you will (not to be mixed up with a bee keeper). The Tree Keeper grows with the tree and helps the tree grow. It’s really quite a wonderful partnership. If you were ever lucky enough to sit in a Tree Keeper’s lap (which some adults, and most children are) it would feel like coming home to the most patient, loving, gentle, warm hearth of a soul while being rocked in a great twiggy rocking chair. While you are rocked by the Tree Keeper, you lose track of time and learn to trace the stars across the night sky the way shepherds did in biblical times. You learn the mystery of rising mist and dewdrops on spiders’ webs, you learn the song of dawn’s sunrays and how birds weave their feathers in the wind, and you learn the rhythm of the drumbeat in the earth’s core and it’s sister footwork in African dance... ...and what you can learn from a Tree Keeper goes on and on and on. But lest we get too far off track, which is easy to do in the presence of Tree Keepers, there is one unique and wonderful and very important gift Tree Keepers are entrusted with: giving blessings. They give small blessings and large blessings and sprinkle them out like fairy dust in rainbowed storms. They blow warm winds of blessings and cheerful thoughts of blessings. Their blessings spiral and cajole and dance among the raindrops and sunrays alike. Whether you know it or not, you probably have been lucky enough to be blessed by a Tree Keeper hundreds of times— a blessing that embraced, transcended and suspended you with a kiss of grace, a kiss of eternal love, a sacred blessing.  Your contributions help support The Purple Phoenix Press.
|
|
Send an Email to The Purple Phoenix
|
[Close window]