TAO 

        Every day I look out of my front window and see an enormous walnut tree. I see this tree going through its annual cycle process of budding in spring, flowering in summer, decaying and shedding its leaves in autumn, and resting in a barren state throughout the winter, until the green regeneration miraculously returns again in spring.  Over the longer cycle of time I know that even before I was born, this tree started its life as a tiny seed, which has grown and developed into a mature tree, and barring a disaster at some time in the future it will eventually decline and die. As a creature existing in time, the tree is much more of an event than an object. And I the person looking at it, am also subject to these cycles, I too am a process, am flowering and constantly altering. The Tao is in the tree and in us aligning us with the natural flow and order of the universe.

Quoted with the permission of Mark Forstatter. The Spiritual Teachings of the Tao.