Missing the Point

I live in a world in which everything is forced into words. In fact, it might occur to someone that this post is an attempt on my part to do just that. Actually, it was started with the goal of indicating the limitations of words and concepts. My life is largely lived in realities which are deeper and broader than I am. Words only catch hold at the shirt tail of these living and moving entities. They at best help me to apprehend, not comprehend, the forces of my life.

I feel myself living on the crest of a wave, often not knowing what land I shall be cast onto. I am apart from the people around me who frequently seem to me to be living in a different land. I rarely get the point of what is being said. I understand that that primarily indicates my lack of intellectual power, but it also is a symptom of the fact that I am looking in a different direction determined by the forces which control my life.

Wood enters this melee of pushes and pulls as a lead into things I cannot (and don’t want to) control. Like me, it seems to live beyond itself. It depends fundamentally on no particular power that I can identify. If I could, I’d be able to understand the geological, climactic, indeed, the life essence of wood, but I don’t. It is sometimes like the tree in the Shel Silverstein book (The Giving Tree) that gives its life for a person. At alternative moments, it is gloriously beyond my ability to touch it in any meaningful way. Like me, it misses the point so often.