AvienMael's Journal

   Sitting under a large oak, I was looking the forest floor. This is a place that was necessary to clear of some diseased trees a few years ago, which opened up the thick to a lot of sunlight.  The mushrooms, and other fungi have retreated. Everywhere there are young oaks, red and white, sprouting up, and the mountain laurel has come up to replace the ferns with a fierceness found only in nature. The wintergreen is peppering the ground with red fruit everywhere I look.

   I considered this for a while. I knealt close to the ground, and ran my fingers into the soil. It is a solid mass of roots of every kind, all intertwined in the peat...one large living skin of plant looking for some ray of light, needing only that to grow. I began following them to find that most seem to stretch for several feet, before finding a place in the light where they could sprout and climb. Where there appears to be an absence of life between the trees and shrubs, there is in fact an abundance of it, lying dormant...waiting...seeking. All of this life...competing, and yet existing in harmony.

   I walked for a ways, to a place where another oak was uprooted during a winter storm. Here there is a break in the forest floor, a hole left by the uprooted tree. I observed how beneath this living mass is a rocky, mix of soil and clay. The forest floor has shrunk back from this place, cannot exist there, yet thrives all around it, and does not miss it. I know that eventually the heartiest of root will claim this little patch of ground, and the forest will return to it and it will have life again. All it needs is one subtle change, a limb to fall...exposing it to the light once more. Light shone there before, else there would have been no treee to die. Light will shine there again in time. As long as this occurs naturally, the harmony of this fragile system will not be disrupted.

   This too, I pondered on for a while, and then the lesson in all of this became clear to me. Our hearts are like the roots of the forest floor...seeking their place in the sun to thrive. We may not find that place where we have rooted, but if we continue to seek it, one will be found. There will be storms to strike us down. An uprooted tree is no different than a broken marriage. One life ends, a new one will take it's place...in time...and this cannot be forced.

   But it must be allowed...otherwise we break the cycle of things, and the harmony we need to sustain us is lost. If no root is allowed to take hold in that barren spot where the oak once stood, that place will erode and spread, disrupting the harmony around it, like a cancer.

   I closed my heart, and denied myself some time ago as a matter of self preservation. Now it is time to let the light back in, and see what grows there...it has been a long winter, after all...