Friday, November 14

Make like a tree…

Ok, so I was lying on the back of my car the other day…yes…I said laying ON the back of the car. :-) And I was thinking. OK, really my mind was just free floating and wandering. As I lay there looking up at the sky, I noticed that the tree I was laying under blocked out portions of the sky, but not all the same portions. See, there were layers of branches, some higher, some lower, and they each blocked out a certain part of the sky.

That got me thinking about people, and life. It seems to me that WE as people live a lot like trees do sometimes. We filter our lives and our feelings and our thoughts and everything else through a giant set of layers that block out certain things. And eventually, we get what we call Life.

So Life actually becomes distilled and patchwork as we take out pieces to suit our own filters. I think that’s why certain moments in our lives become SO powerful to us. We experience them without all our filters on.

The sad thing is that you can’t simply deal with all the filters at once and be done with them. See your filters a formed in layers, with each layer unique and different in every way from the other layers. We have layers from every phase of life, baby, child, teen, young adult, adult…etc. We have layers from momentous moments in life, weddings, deaths, births…etc. And we also get layers from those events that seriously impact our lives, mental status, emotional status…etc.

So what does this mean for us? Think of it like life coming through a decanter. Bits and pieces of it get filtered out and you either don’t acknowledge them or don’t deal with them. It also means that in order to start pruning your own personal tree, you’ll need to deal with things that happened all throughout your life and at all the various stages you’ve been through.

The good news in all this? As you strip away each layer’s filter, you can start to get more from the sunshine of Life. And as you start to feel more of Life, it makes things a bit easier when you go to deal with the remaining layers.

Have you ever seen a Master pruning a Bonsai tree? They shape it into the form that it already has. They trim and prune and shape to bring out the beauty that is within. That’s a great image of what you’re going to do here. Your tree has simply become overgrown. We don’t take care of or deal with things as they come, so now we’re standing under the branches of a tree that just might be blocking most of Life’s Sunshine out. The only way for us to reveal our own inner beauty, which exists within each of us already, is to take up the clippers and start pruning your trees branches and letting the light come in.

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