Faith in Trees

What is very, very important? What concerns are so important that we must go out and address them? What of faith and what of belief.

Wearing his fedora a man stands in a small stand of thin trees. Winter, the sky is a dark white, maybe light grey, but it is snow laden and threatening to let loose soon. The ground in the woods is also white. Dingy clumps of paths cleared are now covered up by new clean sparkling snow. The earth’s warmth has kept the sidewalk clear so far. This moment in the trees exists between two “snow events”

Clad in his long leather coat the man stops. Dark eyes survey the small empty wood he has been journeying through. Forty years he thinks to himself forty years and this wood is not really much different that when I first came by this way. No tree had seemed to be more than a few feet taller. No tree seemed more than a maybe an inch thicker. He was 90 pounds heavier, six inches wider and everything about him had changed since that first trek through this trees.

Standing in the thin woods snowflakes would occasionally fall and find their way to ground, a warning not to delay perhaps. This space, this place was very much the same when he first passed this way. How much longer until these trees mature he thought silently. How much longer until I mature he then mused. His slight smile hid a good natured inner guffaw at that question.

Light was fleeing this end of day. With the hints of snow threatening the air was cold enough that he could not linger long here. Were these clouds not so dense, the sun would have been fading and falling away behind his back. One foot moved forward, for he knew he would have to push on to his appointment.

100 years ago had he been standing here without a tent pitched already or a cabin in his sightline he would have been in trouble. Precious life might well had been in jeopardy if he lacked flint and a knife. Tonight he was simply going to listen to a talk about epistemology. In simple terms someone would be talking about how we know what we know and what are we justified in believing. Standing on that path amongst those trees now forty years his acquaintance he knew and he believed.

And yes those are really the trees in which he stands.