The Tao of Symbols

Outside my open window dwells an oak. I seldom really see it. I'm too busy. Yet sometimes, as unexpectedly as a sudden breeze billowing the curtains, it gathers my attention, filling me with its dark presence. It must have spoken to someone else too. For whoever built this quiet little cottage left a notch in the eves of the roof, allowing a gray branch to gnarl its way skyward unobstructed. Evidentially the architect miscalculated and the carpenter simply compensated in favor of the oak, disfiguring the roofline rather than the integrity of the living form. Just down the hill stands another oak, agonized, twisted, yet flourishing. It is framed by a vast window, inside of which a man, carved from oak, hangs. He dangles limply from a cross, his back to the window and the great tree. People come to this little stone chapel to dance and sing, to sit quietly, to play music, and to pray--sometimes, I think, more to the tree than to the oaken figure that seems to merge with it. Oaks abide. And abiding they are revered, for they reveal that which abides within us. What frequenter of oak groves at dusk has not felt the abysmal power of their stillness and borne it secretly away into the night? Oaks abide, and oaks are prayers -- their dark hearts leafing outward into the light as surely as human hearts flower inward, following the grain of an even fuller illumination. Like oaks, words that embody the abiding endure through vast reaches of space and time. In fact, our words "truth," "trust," and "tree" can all be traced back four thousand years to an ancient Proto-Indo-European word for the tree that to them was the Truth. That tree was the oak. They called the oak *dorw, which also meant "firm," "strong," "enduring." The oak is, after all, a stout tree, as anyone who has cut through oakwood can testify.