Story: 7. ) Tree Reading / from A BOOK IS LIKE A SACRED ISLE: A Rain of Booklight

Tree Reading

   I watch my daughter disappear with a book and climb up into our huge liquid amber tree; it is a time of difficulty for her in her life and she chooses this way to deal with it. It works well. I go into the house immediately to give her privacy and space; and to make her, a favourite meal and a chocolate cake.

   While I am in the kitchen cooking I remember my own childhood, and I am taken back in time to when I dreamed that I could do the same thing with my worries and just climb a big oak tree and sit in its comfortable fork and read away my cares. Unfortunately, we did not have any big trees in our suburban garden so I had to make one up.

   My childhood was almost entirely composed of daydreams and the writing of stories in my head. But if I could have remembered one of my stories of reading in a tree it would have gone rather like this:

THEY WOULD NOT KNOW I WAS HERE, either the little people or the humans who tended me. I was safe. No one could possibly know where flight had taken me, or where I was, or that I could be in a tree.
   I am caught up from the earth. I am high up in an emerald world. This is my fortress. From my window all things look balanced and I wonder that I did not come here sooner.   The realm below is pieced in segments like an orange. They do not know it. They do not have eyes to SEE. They are not even peeled. How do they expect to know anything? Crawling through the segments they are like grubs. Like caterpillars. They do not hear their wings deep inside them waiting to be born. They do not have ears to HEAR.
   All my pain comes out. It is running in streams down the tree. I am crying but no one sees. They have not known how to look above themselves, or how to find the way to touch this far. Their windows are pallid. They are covered. I cry for them.   I am my book. My book is me. I have learned to read myself. That is why I hear and see; the peel is gone.
   I sing and the sun reaches down from above. I stretch my wings and they are resplendent with light. This green world fills me with many books inside my head. This tree is a book. It slumbers through the day but it is full of stories. Where will I fly to next?

  

   My daughter is eating chocolate cake now. She half smiles at me. We are comrades in arms, her and me. Together we can take on the world. Perhaps one day they will open their eyes and SEE; for in hearing their wings will come out and take them to where we've been.  

   It is our childhood that is the time for unlimited possibilities; sad if we have lost it.  

   ‘A little child shall lead them.’

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