Short Story: The American Indian Medicine man gives a lesson, on nature, to his son

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The American Indian medicine man, Fastcloud, was talking to his young son about trees. He told the boy that trees are human in many ways. They bleed, they talk, they creak, they move. They live both above and below the ground. Then, he asked his young son this question: "Why is a tree partly buried in the ground, and not all in the ground, or all above the ground?" "What weightage is underground compared to above ground?" The son thought that the obvious answer would be that more of the tree was above ground, but in what proportion would this be? He thought that the answer would be something like 60:40, but he was surprised when his father told him that it was exactly 50:50. The father then told him: "The relationship of the underground roots to the above-ground tree in weight comparison, is usually that the top above-ground part of a tree weighs 5 to 6 times more than what the roots do." "The 50:50 weight ratio that I have also indicated as being true of a tree more refers to the weightage of the importance, of this split, not the actual weightage of the weight." "The 50:50 split is in it's importance to the tree." "Both parts of a tree, its above-ground part, and its underground part, are equally important to the tree, just as in our own lives, our inner and outer lives are as equally important too." Being well-read, even of the White ma's teachings this wise old Indian elder then quoted this quote of the Buddha, which seemed to confirm what he had just said to his son, too. "We are the same as plants, as trees, as other people, as the rain that falls. We consist of that which is around us, we are the same as everything." "This means," he said to his son, "that trees, plants, even the rain, have inner and outer parts to them too, and inner and outer reasons, for their existing too." "Life without love, is like a tree without roots." "We too, have roots, and our roots, are connected, via our soul, to our creator, the Great Spirit, or to God, as the white man calls him," he concluded, in a philosophical last word, for today, to his son. "Life is impossible to exist without love." Photo Credit: The photo used in this article was sourced from the free media site, pixabay.com (An American Indian medicine man talks about a tree, and concludes, it is very much like you, and me!)