Love lessons from trees

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It takes millions, even billions of years before a fertile top soil has formed. The rich and dark-colored layer of humus is the result of the growing and dying of trees and plants, which make their organic matter from gases in the air and minerals of the earth. From light of the sun, water, gases in the atmosphere and minerals from rock, life is produced and is passed on to the soil for later generations to benefit.

This is such a silent and patient sacrificing of earlier generations to give life to offspring. What a love is there! No demanding or screaming loudly for attention, but nearly visible and ongoing investment and sacrifice.

The trees and plants that later grow on these soils cannot but pay respect to what was given to them. They express their gratitude by doing exactly the same as what their ancestors have done. They live and bring forth and leave their produce for their own offspring. Their seeds fall in this rich ground and sprout filled with desire for life.

Humans and animals also profit from all this giving and they cannot but feel much love for the Earth and the Sun and the air and the water and the trees that gave to them the foundations to live.

Shouldn’t our love be like that? Quietly and silently giving without asking, loving without expecting, all for the sake of generations that come after us. Can we not be sure that when we give like that, for weeks, months, years, decades, those that we have obliged to us cannot but recognize who is their source of life?

It is our sacrificing and producing well in the stillness of the days and nights for those whom we love which will make them feel like they are leaves on our twigs, branches on our stem, and no branch will cut itself off from its life source. Just like the trees first invest in food by making the soil rich and productive for the seeds they later bring forth, so we can learn to prepare the soil for those we love.

How far should we go in this? When you give and sacrifice for your children, they will always love you. But when you give and sacrifice in exactly the same way for who are not your children, they too will begin to love you as if they were your children. We have it in our own hands, how much harmony we make and with how many loving us we will be surrounded in the eternal future. There does need to be no limit to such giving and therefore there will be no frontiers to the world of love we are creating.

It is such determination I feel this morning. A period has passed and a new time is coming. My certainty for the future lies not in calculated guesses but in the insemination of the soil I grow on and in the seeds of love I plant.

Let’s all join in building such a world of love!

February 6, 2008