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What If I walked around to the other side?

9/17/2013

 
Picture
The Light was harsh on a cluster of white birch, who were busily--peeling-1/8-inch-a-day-busy--just too bright and blinding to see the beauty of the white, glistening, silvery gleam of the bark.  And then green lichens were adding their 2 cents worth... they were probably 70 years old... nature works more on hundred year increments, and million year increments.

With all this harsh, blinding Light, the question came out of the blue....  (actually from the tree)
What if I walk around to the other side?  Flexibility, looking from a different perspective, having no judgment just walking around the tree 360 degrees.  It was definitely the tree speaking to me:  "Walk around to the other side.   Show some creativity about where you stand.  Does the Star stay in the same place in the sky all day long?  Does the Earth refuse to rotate?  Rotate your 'bod' around me," said the birch tree. 

So NOT wanting to be the rigid "know-it-all" of decades ago, I took the suggestion/wisdom--and the whole idea was reinforced when the Birch Tree dared to add,  "If the Earth could rotate its 'bod' completely and continually for 11.4 billion years, I could probably do the same around this beautiful Birch Tree in 10 seconds."

So here is the side in the shadow side of the Birch Tree( whose name "birch" is 10,000 years old ).  I guess you could say the shadow side of this Birch Tree is sort of like the dark side of the moon:  what we don't see, is often surprisingly elegant.
Moving very close to the tree to get the shadow side exposure acccurely, she and I created this striking display of beauty, that I could not have seen, had I not rotated my 'bod.' 

The Star would have preferred otherwise, but I'm now an adult, and not a kid who does what everybody else says I should do... including the Star.  The nerve of her!

The Star expressed her dispeasure by sending a blinding array of Photons all around the peelng birch... but  it made no difference.  I was shooting in manual, which also meant my camera was not impressed either.  "The exposure is set for the shade, and that is that" ( that's what my camera was saying to the Star, with an edge of stubbornness ).  How grateful I am that "manual" on my camera also stands for a healthy degree of stubbornness.

Back home at my PC I said into the air, "Sorry, Charlie, all that blinding light, (angry?) is going away.  So I painted with a black brush.  My brush can get as small as one pixel, but my preferred smallest size is 4 pixels.  And going around the edges of the Birch tree, the blazing Light slowly...  s-l-o-w-l-y became black.

So that's the story.  In the ancient days, they used to conclude with a moral.  The moral of this story is, if the Earth can rotate its 'Bod' completely in 24 hours, which is going P-R-E-T-T-Y fast, then I can rotate my 'bod' to the other side of a Birch Tree for a different perspective... or to the shadow side of an other person to see life from their perspective...  and moving my 'bod' to do that, isn't such a big deal as I make it, compared to what the Earth does A-L-L the time.

S-S-S-O-O-O-, Slow down, go easy, rest when tired, look, I mean L-O-O-K, just take the next right step, not the 3rd or 4th, just the next right step. 

I've got a lot of voices inside me, some of them have some good things to say.  I pay as much attention to them as I can, and I educate the others.  ( That seems to be the best way for those negative voices, not to get into a fight with them which I always lose, but educate them)

How are you coming with rotating your 'bod' and educating those negative voices?





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