Host and guest

Words are so much a part of convention. In life's great flux nomenclature falls like dying leaves from a tree. The tree itself remains standing with all those leaves scattered about its great girth. Season shifts, a tree grows one more ring-node on its trunk. Its age is thus marked. And so it goes on.
We who understand all the pluses of possession, of acquisition and proprietorship and ownership, should know at some deeper level that really there is no owning without threat. Ownership works so like a beast 'marking' a tree with secretion from its gland. We use lofty phrases to communicate; we spray our area with a different odour. It reeks of law.
Forest breaks no law. Summer follows winter and then rains and summer again. There is renewal - of zest, of the lust for life, even renewal of the necessary poise to take on the most devastating foe, the time. Man would say that time wins. The forest would smile and fall quiet.
These are words. They are a part of human convention. Nature is unconventional, and therefore fresh and full of surprises. Forest hosts everything and everybody without claiming to be the host. It is wide and deep and benevolent, so benevolent that it forgives you even after you have damaged it. It invites you deep into itself: you are its guest as long as you need to be so. The moment your need to be the guest is absolved you become the forest!
Yes, you become the forest.

- Charudatta