Talking to the trees..

I was involved in some martial arts training in the outdoors recently. There was a young tree near to where I was standing and, without thinking about the feelings of this poor tree, I decided to practice my side thrust kick. Expecting to be able to break the tree without much effort I was amazed that my kick had no impact whatsoever. The tree simply bent over and then sprang right back to where it was before. So I tried again, and again, and the same thing happened. Being rooted firmly into the earth, but at the same time offering no resistance to the force applied to it, the tree was able to carry on living happily while I was wasting my energy trying to kick the thing.

I learnt a lot from this little tree. The first lesson is that kicking trees is generally not such a good idea. Perhaps I was fortunate that this particular tree didn't retaliate.
The other, more important, lesson was this:
Life is full of movement and change- full of stuff that happens that doesn't quite fit into what we think we need to make us happy. We can mutter and complain and resist the inevitable change, either with it breaking us, or generally making us miserable. Or, like the tree, being grounded in the earth and the knowledge that this is how life is, we can be flexible and move with it. Then life becomes less of a struggle for existence and more of a dance..