Sometimes I can be a bit thick, rather slow on the uptake. What I am referring to is with regard to matters of a spiritual nature.

I’m going to a Druid retreat shortly and have offered to lead an afternoon centred around a very old Yew tree. Planning how this would work out it fits together rather nicely with the idea of ancestry, something that druids pay a lot of attention to. So I have been devising a guided meditation on ancestry using the tree as a link back to the past.

Whilst it might seem that I am digressing, just stay with me a little longer. This time of the year is always a busy time as it is the time when I cut, split and stack all my firewood for the coming winter. It needs to be done by Easter.

So yesterday morning I was working away splitting quite large rounds of cedar with my hydraulic splitter and suddenly there was what seemed to be a twig which I promptly discarded. I carried on working and a little later another, slightly larger, “twig’ appeared in the centre of the log as If to say to me “pay attention”. So this slightly larger twig ended up in my hand and I realised that the smaller twig was in fact the centre of the tree that I had been splitting. It was the very first year of growth for that tree. So after grovelling around in the chippings I rescued it.

So where does this fit into the first part of this post about ancestry? Everything that lives starts out small, from a seed of some kind and then gets engulfed by the growth that follows and what I had in my hand was the very early part of the growth of that tree, something we rarely see. My perspective is that in the society in which I live we have a tendency to forget or ignore that which has gone before, we pay little heed to our ancestry or even acknowledge our own history and that of our parents. This little “twiglet” was a reminder for me. I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to fit this into my afternoon workshop but it somehow seemed significant and It took spirit two goes to get me to stop and contemplate what I was being gifted.. as I said I’m sometimes a bit thick. So maybe I need to pay more attention.