A Buddhist vignette by Fred Leeds

My modern mind is very strict and seems to impress itself upon me like a command. The main rule is that all things be codified and known. This streamlines both my physical and my mental actions, as my thoughts and behaviors are handled with the same technical economy. My deeper mind suffers correspondingly as a result. Its ancient role of celebrating life’s energies, of recognizing nature’s intended beauty and grace, is given short shrift. When I look at the tree in the yard, for example, with my deeper mind, I see a thing in living motion, a subtle meaning, a spirit slowly dancing. While I do not actually see the tree molecules move, my intuition seems to know that they do.

All this violates the tenets of my modern mind. What I am supposed to see when I look at a tree, I tell myself, involves only its practical futurity; here’s a plant of a given species, the raw material for a table or a chair perhaps. Because of my stubborn attention to nature’s origins, however, I can still discern what my sensible calculations might forbid: the universe compact in a single living being, a miracle microcosm of the All. In this way, I recollect my identity with all other things through Brother Tree.

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