TREES BY THE LAKE ...COMPASSION

AN OCEAN REFUSES NO RIVER .......

TREES by the lake.....

As the sun rises slowly over the horizon, over the trees, these trees become all of a sudden golden. All the leaves are bright with life and as you watch them as the hours pass by, - an extraordinary quality seems to spread all over the land, over the lake.

And as the sun rises a little higher the leaves begin to flutter, to dance. And each hour seems to give to the trees a different quality. Before the sun rises they have a sombre feeling, quiet, far away, full of dignity. And as the day begins, the leaves with the light on them dance and give them that peculiar feeling that one has of great beauty.

By midday their shadow has deepened and you can sit there protected from the sun, never feeling lonely, with the trees as your companion. As you sit there, there is a relationship of deep abiding security and a freedom that only trees can know.

Towards the evening when the skies are lit up by the setting sun, the trees gradually become sombre, dark, closing in on themselves. The sky has become red, yellow, green, but the trees remains quiet, hidden, and are resting for the night.

We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree.

Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots. You must be extraordinarily sensitive to hear the sound.

This sound is not the noise of the world, not the noise of the chattering of the mind, not the vulgarity of human quarrels and human warfare but sound as part of the universe.

Just watch. Watch those clouds shaping and reshaping, watch the trees, the little birds. It is all part of life. When you watch attentively, with diligence, there is nothing to learn; there is only that vast space, in the silence.

But watching, in which there is attention, awareness, and a great sense of passion, awareness has its own intelligence.

This watching and intelligence acts. But this requires great alertness, to see things without the word, without the name, without any reaction ...

in that watching there is a great vitality.........COMPASSION.