Bonnie, our workshop leader gave this assignment: Go outside into nature, look around a go to the first thing that notice with any degree of curiosity. Think about it. Examine it. Feel it. Drop deeper and sense its essence. Listen to what it wants to say and write about it with no editing. I picked up a pinecone. Here is what the pinecone said.

I pick you up to examine you more closely than I’ve thought of taking the time to do before. The first thing I notice is your one broken steam, barley hanging on and seeming so fragile. This opens my heart. I then notice your sharp pointy edges at the tip of each of your steams.

How am I like you?

I too am fragile. I too have sharp pointy strategies for protecting my fragileness. They can and have hurt others and cause them to bleed, just like you.

As a young boy I used you to win fierce pinecone battles in neighbor’s back yards. I wore gloves to protect my tender hands from picking you up and blocking your brother pinecones being herald at me with no mercy.

How am I like you?

I use my intelligence, sharp wit and humor to protect me from anyone getting to close to my fragileness, and like you may never know what it’s like to be held tightly.

Are you dead or alive? I really do not know. Do you have a purpose, other than ammunition for pinecone wars or are you just taking up space? Did you die and fall to the ground while reaching for the heavens to just take up space or to give birth to another mighty pine? I do not know.

How am I like you?

In my brief existence as a man, I have come to know that I am more able to add more value to flow of life here on the ground than reaching for the heavens.

What I’m touched by in this moment is the simple feeling of AWE that the act of being present to you has opened up for me. Somehow during our brief encounter, the whole of eternity and grand cycle of life and mystery of it all opens itself to me, through you.

Thank you precious pinecone-holder of the secrets and barer of a glimpse into eternity.

I so want to embrace you, to bring you to my chest , hold you and squeeze you so tightly. Yet, I’m afraid it will hurt too much.

In Wholeness,  Michael