Do not go gentle...

"All relationships lead toward separation."

- Clark Moustakas (Loneliness)

I was pondering the sermon I soon would deliver when I found myself drifting into a reverie of the snow sculpted landscape outside my window. The winds were picking up. Tree branches were encased in ice. They were bending and swaying, dancing in mysterious synchronicity. 

I noticed a single oak leaf attached to a branch high in a tree. It was being blown fiercely in every direction. On no other branch, on no other tree, did I see a leaf. This one was dry, shriveled and encrusted in ice. It refused to fall to the blanketed earth below. The winds attacked it ferociously. 

I wondered: Was the leaf tenaciously clinging to the tree? Or was the tree refusing to let it go? Did the leaf fear the fall, or was the tree holding on to this last vestige of warmer, greener times? Was it mutual? Were they clinging to each other out of their separate needs? Were they desperately defying the inevitable separation?

I continued to watch. Is this not what most of our struggles are about? I admired their pluck, but I felt a sadness too - a tree and its leaf against the universe's inexorable demand to let go. 

© Gilbert Friend-Jones

From: Faith in a Minor Key