Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“They are saying in the Flock that if you are not the Son of the Great Gull Himself”, Fletcher told Jonathan one morning after Advanced Speed Practice, “then you are a thousand years ahead of your time.”
Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood he thought. They call you devil or they call you god. “What do you think, Fletch? Are we ahead of our time?”
A long silence, “Well, this kind of flying has always been here to be learned by anyone who wanted to discover it; that’s got nothing to do with time. We’re ahead of the fashion, maybe. Ahead of the way that most gulls fly.”“That’s something,” Jonathan said, rolling to glide inverted for a while. “That’s not half as bad as being ahead of our time”.
Richard Bach
Jonathan Livingston Seagull

The Seagull Speaks Creative Commons Copyright

Thursday, September 2, 2010

The Beauty Of Apple Trees

In the orchard, the apple trees were loaded with fruit...so much, falling down on the ground...all around...

When she wrote, she didn't know about the trees, but she said:

"I guess the meaning is not to "look" at an apple tree with enthusiasm and interest as a child that sees an apple tree for the first or third time, but to acknowledge that we see an apple tree and let the energy of the apple tree reach us and flow into our eyes and heart...."

This seemed to me to be a wonderful description of how to sense Beauty....

Actually, what we see is only a small fraction of all the energy emanating from the apple tree - the energy our eyes can capture...just the electromagnetic wavelengths of visible light, but of course the tree - made of matter (crystallised energy if you like), part of the visible (to us) universe) is vibrating at a virtually infinite number of energetic frequencies, so it (the tree) actually exists in realms/dimensions of reality beyond our senses in addition to those we can see with our eyes.....

So, this is why no matter how hard we try to "see" the apple tree, our vision of the tree (through our eyes and processed in the mind) will never give us a complete appreciation of its Beauty.....

We should allow ourselves to "see" the tree with the aspects of ourselves that are also vibrating at these higher frequencies. The higher frequencies correspond to higher states of consciousness, and to do this we should allow ourselves to transcend the idea that we are separate from the tree, so that the energies passing between us and the tree can interact/exchange more easily, so we then truly begin to "see" the tree with our hearts by allowing "the energy of the apple tree [to] reach us and flow into our eyes and heart...."

I believe this is what happens when our consciousness expands from the heart - it fills the surroundings and we feel much more at-one with everything, since we become more sensitive in picking up the signals/energies in the environment around us....we sense the Beauty in our surroundings....