Page 17 - For A Season

The Healing Leaves

I see a translucent, miniature tree above the book-strewn table. I see a hand reach,

pluck the fruit. I intuit the balance, the loss. Seeing the tree, the tiny hand grasping its fruit,
I imagine the stranger, hear the voice planting a malevolent weed in her innocent mind:

you will not die.
The unknown word die renders the phrase meaningless. Good & evil (in equilibrium)

are equally incomprehensible until the knowing is wrested from the slender branches.
Doubt and deception scatter suffering and the deceived return to the dust, to deepest sleep …

Consider evil a synonym for pain or suffering & good the experience of joy and beauty:

these epiphenomena follow closely upon the act of creation
these equilibrists are placed by the Primogenitor within the tree of knowledge;

within our reaching lies the memory of the first shattering as pure Spirit contracted then
birthed the world. Shards of untamed energy loosed, then gathered in

this template this holy tree where attributes of the Divine signify human possibility.

(Never mind the exegetes of the myth who have perpetuated discontent,
promoted blaming, and in assigning guilt, have stained us with shame

and in consigning childbirth to suffering have intensified pain)

A communion of embodiment, birthing is revelation. Our contractions echo that first sacrifice
as one becomes more than self. Love, divinely conjoined with suffering, envisions the revision
of the holy tree. Leitmotif for poets and sages – the tree of life flourishes (within each heart

the garden) fiercely protected by angelic beings, its fruit seemingly unattainable, its memory
are seeds scattered across the seas to distant lands, transfigured, perhaps as Acacia or Bodhi –

doorways to immortality, to enlightenment – or as the ash Yggdrasil – Odin's gallows upon
which he hung nine long nights pierced by a spear, dedicated, self to self-sacrifice seeking

radical wisdom … Life-tree grafted to knowledge-tree whose deep-reaching roots are gnawed
by a vast wyrm, the dragon-serpent who seeks the continued undoing of creation …

And yet, a ritual lingers on the western plains recalling the regenerative power of the pierced
man. Even now a word of truth echoes across immeasurable distances. The impassioned word

resonates upon that hybrid, that broken tree (the deadwood tower) resonates within the
restored and singular tree, where each leaf bends in the wind, offering its meaning