The tree does not debate the river.
It does not gather the other trees together
to construct arguments proving the water exists.
It drinks.
It receives.
It stands in silent participation with something
older than memory
and deeper than language.

Its leaves do not resist the wind.
They move with it,
yielding without shame,
dancing without fear,
as though surrender itself were wisdom.

And I stand before it,
sixty-four years old,
a preacher of sermons,

a carrier of scriptures,
a defender of doctrines
I inherited before I inherited consciousness itself,
and suddenly I realize
the tree may understand something
I do not.

Not intellectually.
Not philosophically.
Not through books or councils or creeds.

But through being.

The river was flowing
before the tree understood it.
The sun was shining
before human beings developed language to describe it.
Life was already happening
before we built religions explaining life.

And somewhere in the silence
between the bark and the leaves,
between the roots and the water,
between the wind and the movement,
I sense a form of knowing
so ancient and intuitive
that human thought cannot fully reach it.

The tree knows exactly what it is.

Not with words.
Not with theology.
Not with argument.

It simply participates in existence
without dividing itself against existence.

And perhaps that is why
I cannot stop thinking about it.

Because after all the sermons,
all the scriptures,
all the debates,
all the inherited certainties,
all the attempts to explain God,
life, death, suffering, salvation, eternity,
and the strange burden of being human,
I find myself longing
not for more answers,
but for more harmony.

More stillness.
More awareness.
More presence.

Somewhere deep within myself
beyond fear,
beyond doctrine,
beyond performance,
beyond the desperate need to always be certain,
I know intuitively
that I want to become more like that tree.

A living thing
standing quietly beside the river,
fully alive,
fully present,
fully participating
in the mystery of existence.

A. Eric Lawrence Frazier Poet