Dancing with the Sky

The tree watched as the little girl approached. Trees are always watching, listening.

The girl sat down beneath the tree and hugged her knees tightly. She took out a photograph, looked at it for a moment, and then began to cry. She cried for a long time, rocking gently back and forth against the tree.  

 Why are you crying? asked the tree.

 Surprised, the little girl looked around. She thought she was all alone.

 The bark of the tree twisted into a wrinkled mouth and spoke to her.

 “Why are you crying?” repeated the tree.

 “I want mummy,” said the girl, between sobs.

 “Is that her in the photograph?” asked the tree.

 “Yes,” she said.  

 “Can I show you something?” said the tree.

 The tree began to wither, turning grey and stooped and tired-looking. All the colour drained out of it, leaving only the pale skeleton of a tree. And in the next moment, the tree was falling and CRASH it thudded down on the earth and began to peel away in flakes bit by bit. Then came moss, bright and green as a velvet coat, followed by mushrooms and ferns and flowers white and blue. Then nothing remained of the tree that once was except for a strange soup of dirt. Out of this, came ants, beetles, worms and woodlice to feed on the soup.

 The girl stood there, confused, for a very long time. Nothing more happened and at last she set off for home.

 That night the little girl could not sleep. Nor could she sleep the next night or the night after that. All she could do was lay in bed with the photograph.

 She knew there was some meaning in what the tree had shown her but she could not make sense of it.

 Three days later, exhausted from lack of sleep and desperate to understand the meaning, she returned to the spot where the tree had once stood at the edge of the forest.

 There, growing out of that earthy mulch, was a tiny green sapling, trembling in the wind.

 A seed must have dropped from the old tree, she thought to herself. And now a fresh sapling is growing and ----

Whoosh! the sapling shot up into a magnificent tree. It towered over her, its mighty trunk disappearing into a dazzling green canopy high above. 

 The tree, once more forming a wrinkled mouth, spoke to her again. “What have you seen?”

 “Time passing,” said the girl.

 “Think again,” replied the tree. “Come back tomorrow and tell me what you have seen.”

 So the next day she returned and told the tree that she had seen the tree grow old and die. Yes, but that wasn’t it. Think again.

 Each day she came back to the tree sure that she had the answer and each day the tree gave her the same reply: Think again.

 Then one night, alone in her bed as she was drifting off to sleep, something arranged itself in her mind like the pieces of a puzzle coming together.  

Early the next morning she woke up and ran down to the tree still dressed in her pyjamas. Now that all the pieces of it were in their proper place, the something shone brightly within her. The tree knew that she knew from the look in her eye; trees do not need words, but people do.

“What have you seen?” said the tree.

“Life,” she said. “I have seen life giving life.”

“You have seen death and dying, too. What do you make of this?”

“Dying is the giving, the bridge between one life and another. Life giving life.”

“Yes,” said the tree holding out its branches to her. And as the little girl wrapped her arms around the tree, a lost feeling of warmth and love fired in her heart.

“Here, have the gifts that your mother gave you,” whispered the tree. “Inside the sadness there is the giving sweetness of a gift.”

And the girl looked up through her tears to see that every leaf was dancing with the sky.