1. The Teacher

"When the student is ready, the teacher arrives."

All aimless wanderings kept leading here. Again, and again. The first week, the leaves falling, the second, the bare branches, the third, the first green buds. And then the flowers, all around the slender wrists. Way up there in the sunlight, visible only through your zoom lens.

Every single week, the tree is different. The ritual the same, but the god at the altar, revealing new faces every time.

We step and not step into the same river. We never meet the same tree again. And we are never exactly the same people we were. "At every meeting we are meeting a stranger."*

And you know that in June the dry pods will break, and the ground below will be covered with silk cotton. Which you would like to think squirrels and birds take to line their nests with. That unbelievable softness.

So much change, and so much calmness. Strong, sturdy, sheltering. Beautiful in every single phase. You unravel, and then return to this healing, this lesson, again and again, every week. The silk cotton tree saves you every single time.


My soul counselled me and charged me
Lest I be exhalted because of overpraise
and lest I be distressed for fear of blame.

Until that day I doubted the worth
of my own handiwork;
But now I have learned this:

That the trees blossom in spring,
and bear fruit in summer
and drop their leaves in autumn
to become utterly naked in winter
Without exhaltation and without fear or shame.

Kahlil Gibran, Prose Poems

"He gazed at it for several minutes. A tree had never before been so soothing to him. As he admired it, he could feel the anger and distress draining from him."

"A stroll in a London park and an encounter with a beautiful tree at least taught him that useful lesson: if you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left."

Yann Martel, in 'Beatrice and Virgil'

* T.S.Eliot

Later posts here: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/search/label/Notes_from_a_Ritual