There are these men in the forest. They have been called by the landlord to cut down tall trees that would fall across the road in a high wind storm after or during rain. They sing in a lilting Spanish while they work in the trees. Perhaps their songs are about women they have known or would like to know. They climb high into the branches, sometimes over a hundred feet off the ground, with a running chainsaw hanging from their belts, carefully belayed by the expensive climbing ropes, tossed over forks in the tops of the trees they are cutting. They step with great care onto long branches that are no thicker than a wrist.
These men have great awareness of the forest- and there is a kind of thoughtful approach they take, as one would approach a lovely woman for the first time. They are aware of dangers that even she herself doesn’t know. To move among the branches, defenses, and know which to take first, so that later, without conscious thought, one is not caught by what is unplanned.
Perhaps that is also what brings these men to the woods. Along with as heady and sharp a perfume as ever adorned a female human, “the talls” (Los Altos) bravely bleed stiff scent into the air as their conquerors take them, as a man takes a woman- to the surprise of both.
There are those who have long ago found trees to be phallic- yet I might suggest that these beings are as to the forest as hair is to us. Maybe that’s inaccurate also, as our human hair is not alive as it is grown from our bodies. These trees are living beings- and the men who take them know this- and are full of care, and respect, and technique- to do their work and stay as safe as they can- knowing full well, that there are those individuals who will fool them particularly when one is distracted-
Life can be lost this way- when distracted- when work with the sacred becomes routine, or mechanized. Such a slow death-life transformation we are undergoing from the willful ignorance of the corporate persons, who find their sustenance from a sole pursuit of unthinking and limited value games within the context of the whole.
Its so plain to see. The Apollo astronauts saw it- Not that our lives as human beings are a zero-sum game- yet we might just want to consider a bit more thoughtfully, not only the intrinsic nature of our being, and not only how we may be inhabiting it, but how we are perhaps literally compromising our own body- in (many times willful) ig-norance.
The ancient Greeks who declared that our world was made up of elementals were not so far wrong- yet instead of fire, air, water, and earth, we have vibrating strings and membranes. And now there is more and more confirmation of the Higgs field, that gives otherwise weightless particles mass, in concert with these vibrating energies.
Of course, we will have to continue to look more and more closely at the nature of Reality- and we will continue to find more and more to be aware of-
Yet there is a kind of orientation of awareness that we can embrace, that allows us access to this infinite unfolding. This awareness is other than finite- it must be infinite- as only the infinite can attend to the infinite- yet the good news is that each human being, each human interface is as capable of this infinite interface as was anyone through time. The recipe, the hackneyed recipe is ego-death.
©2011 Anthony S. Wright, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved.
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