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Today's guidance from "Opening Doors Within" had the subject of Beauty and how seeing beauty can lead to Love.
Here's my beauty story:
At Upland we have planted quite a few deciduous trees in our clearing because they are familiar to both of us from our pasts. The trees here are mainly snow-shedding conifers. When we knew this would be our home, we brought with us a Rowan seedling, extricated from a sidewalk crack in our, then, urban environment. In 13 years it has flourished and is now 25 feet tall and beautiful throughout the seasons.
A family of sapsuckers (link) (members of the woodpecker family) have called it dinner. They drill holes and the tree bleeds and they return to drink and drill more holes.
We have protected this and other trees with a girdle of screen around their trunks. But our mother Rowan is now multi-branching and beyond protecting. This year's sapsucker brood are permanently in the tree. Now I realize my feelings for the sapsuckers have cooled, to say the least. Especially as we see for the first time that the crown of this vibrant tree is in decline. The long-term sap loss can be fatal.
Well, to make a long story shorter, this morning one of the young sapsuckers bounced off a kitchen window. As it lay dazed, in my partner's hand, I had a chance to really see it. It was so beautiful, its tawny head beginning to show future scarlet and the intricacy of its black and white dotted plumage a marvel.
My heart opened and when we set it gently at the base of the Rowan and it recognized home and began to climb, I saw all animosity had ebbed from me and I was thankful we had this tree to offer.
Our Rowan has many children throughout the clearing,distributed by the birds who love its berries. Maybe its own time is ending.
So you see, beauty gave me the grace to look beyond my little view and see the majesty of the bigger picture. And that was the point of today's guidance