....the Mighty Oak Doth Grow.

I Am Oak. "Climb down my roots to meet the rulers of the lower realms. Climb up my branches to greet the gods of upper space."

Today, I'd like to tell three short family vignettes about the oak tree. It all relates to my Binary Agreement Theory (BAT), and starts to plant the seed for the evolution of the actual theory itself. Up until now, I've been making sideways comments about it, cryptic references, and silly syllogisms. I'll continue using many analogies, and there will still be false starts and pauses along the way. After all, oak trees don't grow overnight.

My first story is about my brother and I when we were probably around 8-12 years old or so. He's two years my elder. I've done this exercise with others many times since, but I first remember it as a game that he and I would play. After talking for some time about a variety of things, one of us would recognize that we had covered a number of apparently unrelated topics, so we'd put our heads together and try to re-trace the conversation backwards, not so much caring about what we had talked about, but trying to recall what linkages jumped us from one topic to the next. Our game was to see how far back, and how many topics we could include in the chain.

My second story is about my next older brother, four years my senior. He was a bright kid, but always seemed to have trouble with school work, especially when it came to writing reports and essays and the like. Turns out, as an adult he was diagnosed as graphlexic (which only gave me 3 search hits, and isn't in my dictionary or Wikipedia yet, so maybe my spelling is off). In any case, I remember when he was in about Grade 10 I think, and he read me a paper he had turned in and got a really good grade on. It told the story of an oak tree as it grew up, and eventually sprouted acorns in her hair, but one day a strong wind blew them loose, and she could only cry because she could see her babies lying on the ground, but her roots were so stuck, she couldn't move to help them. Then, one day, she realized they were growing on their own, and using the shade from her overhead branches to keep the sun from burning their tender branches until they were strong enough to grow up on their own and dance with their mother again. (Of course, I may have added a few details he didn't have, but that was the essence of the story, and it must have made an impact on me for me to remember it now).

My third and final story is about my Mom. In the course of his work, my Dad used to travel extensively, and Mom would usually go along if they could afford it. We lived on an acreage in Northern Ontario, and my Mom, if nothing else, was a "nature nut". She loved everything about nature, revelled in walks through the woods, poking at mosses and fungi, watching birds. She "collected" wildflowers of the area by carefully transplanting them into a wooded area in front of our house and tending them as if they were her own progeny. On one of their trips overseas, they were in Romania, and she picked up a handful of Romanian oak tree acorn/seeds (declaring them with customs, of course. My Dad was an entomologist, so they were extremely mindful of inadvertently importing no-no's). She planted them, and today there are a number of Romanian oak trees standing proud north of Sault Ste Marie in Ontario. But, spreading the sequence further still, when my dad passed in 1975, my Mom reluctantly moved into an apartment in town (she didn't drive), and with permission from the landlord, took seedlings from the oak from Romania, and planted one or two by her now home. The last I know, they're still there, full-grown now.

So what's the point, and what does this have to with BAT? One of my founding axioms (as Dave asked me to include some days ago), is that there is a common, generic pattern in absolutely everything, in whatever form it can be conceived....as a game, as a conversation, as a thought, as a story, as a tree, as a person, as humanity itself. Everything and anything. There is not only a season, there is a root. But the root is NOT the start of it all, the root is one of the two simultaneous ends of it. The root is one-half of the infinity loop, the tree the other. They develop simultaneously, as inseparable one from the other as the past is from the future. And the acorn, which 'is' no more, once the tree has grown, 'is' the dot in the middle. I am a dot, with the potential of infinity in an infinite number of directions, spaces and dimensions. With the actuality of the present non-existing moment, for it always becomes a moment just passed. To be infinite. To be, or not to be. Which first, the chicken or the egg? YES.

We'll begin our journey with the seed. "The two best times to plant an acorn are 100 years ago, and now."

The seed, like a hologram, contains within itself the necessary "potential stuff" to create itself. We create our own reality. We are seeds. We are holograms (.)

I like you.
I am.
I am like you.
But I am different.
So are you.



PEACE

The SEED of PEACE.

Posted by Evydense on Saturday, March 04, 2006 at 11:52 a.m. | Permalink