“I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…” 

--David Attenborough

O.K., O.K., O.K...  I don’t know why bad things happen to good people. When I am drawn into a discussion about the nature of God, I must qualify anything I say by admitting that I don’t know what I’m talking about...I’m guessing... and some of the guesses are off-the-wall... and some arise out of wishful thinking.  I have no satisfactory answers to the questions that have driven learned people to draft and offer articles of faith as final proof of whatever they wish to be true.

Yet... Yet... Yet I continue to be moved by what I see... and hear... and feel.

On the morning of June 9th, 2007,  when I sat on the floor of the room in our apartment where I start every day with yoga, I saw a face at the base of a eucalyptus tree in our back yard. Actually, It was half a face, but anybody who had ever been a child in a Sunday School class would say the face was very like the pictures of Jesus in Sunday School books.  

Well, that morning, I went on with the yoga practice wondering what the explanation might be. Every time I looked at the tree, the face was there.  I called Margaret to look at it.  It was there all through the morning.  This variety of eucalyptus tree sheds its skin every year.  The leather-like bark splits and falls away quickly.  At 12:56 p.m. I got my photo du jour.  I know the time because digital cameras record that kind of information.  

I pay attention to that tree.  I see it every morning.  I always notice when the splitting starts.  It happens in June every year, and it began a few days ago.  Mostly the patterns formed by the splitting are abstract. This year the images are intriguing, so I’ve decided to think of this particular tree as my spirit tree.  As I said at the beginning of this writing, I know it makes no sense.  Some things don’t have to make sense.