Excerpt from the Book

“All alone in a vast meadow, grew a tree. It was a very young, very small tree, scarcely taller than the grasses that grew around it.

And because it was alone, the only tree as far as the eye could see, it did not know the way of trees, nor even that it was a tree. All it knew was that it was.

That, and the great, ever-changing sky above it with its shining sun and gleaming moon, its million stars and tumbling clouds. And all day, every day, it yearned towards that sky, thinking it a most beautiful and wondrous thing.

So intrigued, in fact, was the tree with the glory above it that for a very long time it was unaware of its own growth upwards or the silent spread of its roots growing strong and deep in the earth below.

But one day, bowing low beneath the worst storm in the memory of the meadow, the tree was astonished to discover that where before it had only one slender trunk, now, miraculously, branches grew in all directions from that thickened, sturdy trunk, and each branch was laden with the most beautiful leaves.”