mystery

Yesterday I ventured outside to tackle my Picture Inspiration assignment, which was to capture "mystery". I had little time, little energy, and little excitement but I set out anyway. So picture me wandering the park in my post work pj's, with my camera in hand, praying hard for something to catch my eye.  After fifteen minutes of finding nothing I looked up into the new spring growth on the trees and found my mystery! (Cue mysterious music.)  I spotted this mysterious issue, that you see in the above photo, plaguing a handful of trees. At first I did not notice it because the trees were swaying in a lushness of green, but hidden among the perfect leaves were a handful of these rotted, polka-dotted ones.

I am always curious about such things as I am the type of person who likes to get to the core of a problem. So as I inspected the oddly spotted leaves I knew that they were: one, expressing the symptoms of some mysterious illness that worked somewhere deep in their unseen internal life forces.  Or two, the victim of an unseen mysterious pest. And because I am not an arborist, the reason for their spotted appearance was indeed, a real mystery to me.

Okay, so I am a bit geeky about nature and how it mimics life so I immediately thought about how we often do not recognize our own disease (emotional, mental, physical) until it manifests itself in the spotted leaves and fruit of our lives. Then I thought about how too often we try to deal with our external symptoms in a vain attempt to heal (or cover up) the real problem.

Sometimes we can be so dense. I can be so dense.
Honestly, I think some of us are walking this planet in stupid awe (or maybe denial) over the spotted leaves we find sprouting from our limbs. For some, it ain't no mystery to those who linger under our shade. They are not fooled by the lush sway of green surrounding the ugly leaves and can spot our problems before we can. And then there are those of us who spend all of our energy trying to control the symptoms in ourselves and others without ever getting to the root of the problem. A total waste of energy, by the way.

I have always been a firm believer in the root bares the fruit. The external display of our leaves is merely an outworking of what lies in the soil and roots of our lives. You can do your best to orchestrate a magical display of smoke and mirrors, deflection techniques, etc. But eventually whatever it is will continue to eat away at your health like a small unseen, mysterious pest...

...Until you are vulnerable enough to go see an arborist who can sort out the mystery and look you in the face and suggest a course of action that will get you healed from the inside out.

I know from experience, that there are some things in life that are meant to be left a mystery. The source of your well-being, or ill-being is not one of them.

And that my friends, is my pep talk for today. All this from a little walk across the street with my camera, a curious eye, and a pluck of a few leaves.

Now off to google "yellow spotted tree leaves". This is one mystery I'd like to solve.