Sit Quietly and Listen

The birds are the voice of the tree. Thank you Divyashakti for your evocative artwork.

13th October, 2009

I stepped out into the grey dawn, wet underfoot as usual, footfall by footfall where I think the stepping-stones lie beneath fallen-over daffodil leaves. The daffodils have created a foot-high forest, a layer over the earth. I have only water and my mind to give this morning, and the tree needs neither. Nevertheless, I pour it, and it vanishes. I hold my hands together and close my eyes.

Birds are singing and racketing all around. Lapwings call to one another, while smaller songbirds trill away in the background. I imagine the vibrations we sit amongst, the tree and me. I hear them as mantras and see her forms of branch and flowers as yantra and mandala, coalesced energy. She is content and focused while in bloom. Great trusses of pink now hang from all her twigs. It’s a little sad to me that they are sterile, but to her they are just the thing that happens.

She has no spare energy; it’s all focused on the flowers. Her leaves are not yet full and green. They are emerging and red. She tells me just to sit quietly and listen, so I do. I sit amongst the sounds of nature and the beauty of flowers. Flowers are all over the place, not just on her branches. There is a density of them covering the earth around me and filling the sky above.