When I was walking in the park last week, I happened across a young pine who looked so much like my dear old friend, Little Pine, that for a minute I thought I’d been transported back in time. That’s her, the new one, in the photo below. Today, the universe nudged me toward a file where I found, to my surprise, the original Little Pine story from March of 2010. What better love letter, I thought, could I send you today than to blend these two finds together and send them with a smile.
The little pine grew surrounded by mighty elders whose tops brushed the sky and whose branches were homes for squirrels and birds and bugs of every description. She loved the way the wind made music in their boughs, and showered their red needles at her feet. She loved the sparkling fireflies that came in summer to dance from the ground to the stars above.
But most of all, she loved the quiet nights when the elders would whisper the fantastic tales of The World Beyond that they learned from the visiting birds.
Much of it was beyond the understanding of the little pine, and she had no way of knowing whether the stories were make-believe or real. But they were grand stories either way, and as the seasons passed and her understanding grew, the elders were able to explain what the fables meant, and stories took on great beauty and increasing meaning.
The stories the wrens told differed somewhat from the ones the robins told, and theirs differed from the owls’ version in many details. But one year a great eagle had built its nest in the top-most branches of an elder who dwelt high up the distant slope, and it wove the bits of the birds’ stories into one magnificent piece.
Counsels of elders had studied the eagle’s tale through the ages, and passed it down as clearly as they could to the all the trees in the forest.
Just as each tree was a distinctive expression of life, they said, with its own sap and wood, its unique pattern of bark, needles and branches, all together the pines and their leafy cousins were part of a larger community of life known as a forest. And beyond the forest lay other communities, known as plains and mountains and deserts and seas. And altogether, they made up a whole called a planet, and her cousin was the moon, and her mate the sun.
That was all the eagle knew for certain, from its travels. But it believed, the elders said, that the sun and moon and planet were part of yet another whole that was part of another and so on, forever. And its nature was joy, for the space that bound it all together was made of love so vast and deep and all pervasive, that even the tiniest ant who crawled across the pine’s needles felt its power. And every bit of it mattered and was needed to fully express love’s song.
That, the elders told the young pine, was the importance of being exactly who she was. She was needed for love to express exactly the note of joy that she embodied, and in all of creation, she alone could sing it.