Beech Tree News Network

A famous writer said, "I get my stimulation from both; books, and the book of the world."
   
    In retrospect, neither of my grandfathers could read or write. Yet they had a world of knowledge and wisdom. They read the book of the world. Both were men who worked with their hands; farmers miners, timbermen-men who had tasted the real world... the rough world.
    They could talk politics, economics, religion, government and philosophy-they may have called it somethingelse, but that's what it was. Everything trivial that happens to a vane person is important: A hangnail could need nine stitches. You get the drift.
    In the old comic strips, Nancy, Slugo was banging his head against the wall. "Why are you doing that?" Nancy asked him. "Casue it feels so good when I quit, " he told her. A man felt burning pain i his arms. "It seemed to me", he said, "had I been without this pain I would have been wholly happy. In a moment like this I realized how lucky we are when nothing at all-good or bad-happens to us."
    I was seven or eight when I graduated from overalls to pants and a belt. I felt ten feet tall. What is the effect of new clothes on man's mood and behaviors? Nietzsche said that woman who feels well-dressed would not catch a cold even if she were half-naked. Emerson qoutes a lady, saying, that when she is perfectly dressed, she has a feeling of tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow. Max Planck maintained that a new truth does not triumph by conuineing its opponents, but its opponents eventually die. When that happens, a new-generation
grows up accepting the new truth. The Children of Israel wandered 40 years in the wilderness after coming out of slavery in Egypt. Moses could not lead them out until the slave-mentality died out, and a new generation took their place. All the while, they were only eleven days from the Promise Land. They were much like a cow standing between two bales of good hay, starving to death.
    We don't naturally come here with insight: intuition, dicernment, perception. Insights have need to be disconcerned one at a time-maybe over a period of years; "Gosh I've looked at that all my life, now I'm seeing it for the first time." Writer C.S. Lewis said, "Many times we are not aware when the most important things happen to us," This of course, is the lack of early insight- why did I think, say or do this?
I would not now. Why didn't I ask my mother or daddy such and such? I can't now; they are gone. They were the most important of "those things" that happen to us. Lack of insight on my part, it was. The New Testament Apostle, Paul spoke on gaining insight as he matured in years: "When I was a child I thought as a child; I spoke as a child;
I understood as a child. But when I became a man I put away childish things," In other words, "I had gained insight."

                            Kindest regards...