Can't See the Wood for the Trees?

Can’t See the Wood for the Trees?:
Landscaping Your Life to Get Back on Track
By
Alison Smith
Reviewed by Henry Reed
We live in interesting times, so much to ponder over, so
much to wonder about. Changes accelerate in gushes and spurts. As we are flooded
with more uncertainty than we can can cope with we are blessed, in a mixed up
sort of way, with many teachers, saviors, guides, coaches, uncles and best
friends who toss us life preservers. Although all of them look round and as if
they'd support a body, they are really of two types. One is offering to preserve
a sense of personal empowerment, offering ways to increase the effectiveness of
intent upon outer circumstances, offering ways to kick your feet and beat your
arms more effectively to get your way. Another offers the gift of embracing what
is happening, realizing the teaching power of the symbolism imagined in what is
perceived in the moment, accepting pure awareness as the unchanging identity in
a pandimonium of oneness that takes the likes of PT Barnum to divert us from our
folly and become entertained by the love of the moment.
I run along by a few axioms. Can't prove 'em, but they
are handy, and dearly beloved by me. One is that Creation is intelligent and
intentionally evolving. Be Here Now is the doorway to what is truly real,
satisfying, and sustaining in life. Be Still and Know, I am.... Nature is the
best teacher. Every created is an expression of the Source. The senses perceive
the externals, the material fundamentally, the imagination perceives the spirit
internally, metaphorically in symbols.
It's no surprise that in our
days of accelerating uncertainties and rapid changes, we'd look for tools that
could see what we can't. Divination is making a comeback, riding on the tenets
of consciousness concerning a unity of Creation. Divination seeks to realize
what is in Divine Mind, not by looking inward unguided, but by drawing upon a
reflection in the outer world as to a clue to "what's up." Perhaps the
I Ching was
the earliest exampe of the creation of a full divinatory system. I've read that
the inventor of this system did so by contemplating patterns in nature. The wise
person recognizes, respects and rests in the peace of acceptance of these
qualities, and plans his journey accordingly. While I respect the orgins and the
simple binary code (solid and broken lines, stationary or changing) of the
system, it has always puzzled me how nature could be abstracted to such a
rarefied extent as a stack of lines. I've now come upon a book that has the same
basis is the I Ching: nature as source of wisdom, synchronicity, and symbols. In
this case, however, the symbols are the items of nature, not abstract lines.
The basic idea of
Can’t See the Wood for the Trees?:
Landscaping Your Life to Get Back on Track is
to use one's actual life space as the divinatory board, to reframe one's
existence as a landscape, and then to learn lessons from the trees and begin a
process of editing, re-arranging, and updating the landscape of one's life. This
approach goes a whole lot farther than resting against a tree, listening to the
wind in the leaves, and hearing a message. We're talking about the entire
environment.
Life is constant change, and there's an intelligent flow
to the business of Creation. On the other hand, people, God love 'em, get stuck
and cut off from the flow. Our author, Alison Smith, works as a personal coach
and developed this "organic" approach to helping folks tap into their intuitive
ability to make contact with the Spark of Creation, inside and outside, to find
their true and honest way to move forward into a life genuinely their own.
The key to her system lies in the "figures of speech"
(metaphors) that we have to describe our predicaments that borrow from scenes in
nature. Here are some of them: "Making mountains out of molehills." "Up the
creek without a paddle." "Like a fish out of water." "Out on a limb." You get
the idea.
Then you work with this metaphor, filling in the
details, and then as in dreamwork, begin to explore where you might go from
there. What happens is that you begin to become sensitized to the symbolic
communications in every moment out in nature, and you can feel the world around
you accompanying you on your quest to improve your landscape. It's no surprise
that the publisher of this book, Findhorn, has a history of revealing a lot of
magic in nature. Highly recommended.
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