The Story of the Tree of Life
This is my first story coming back from a long vacation. Enjoy.
There was once a tree. It was the largest tree in the garden. It's branches stretched out over the land, ever expanding outward and upward; its roots growing every more thick and numerous as they spread through the soil.
Yes, this tree was a marvel. It had stood up against harsh weather, harsh people, and harsh times. It was still a young tree, but it had seen so many of the other trees fall due to public opinion, weather, and war.
This tree allowed the people of the world to climb it, eat its fruit, and use its shade. And the tree was most happy indeed. The tree loved its people; the praise that it accumulated was tremendous. Yes, this was a most blissful time indeed.
However, with each passing summer came each subsequent winter. The people started to gather their things and left the tree when the snow, sleet, wind, and hail came. The leaves remained on the tree for as long as they could, but they were torn off of the tree one-by-one. The tree was losing leaves, but at least the trunk, branches and roots still remained.
The winter slowly thawed, and the tree began to regain its leaves. The people started to come back, and there was bliss once more. The branches started to grow, with one particular branch entwining itself with another branch.
These branches began to grow together, getting closer and closer to the tips of the branches. The first branch was healthy and strong, as was the second. The second branch, however, existed with a caterpillar, a parasite, on it. The caterpillar slowly devoured the second branches' leaves. But, the irony was that the caterpillar could not live without the branch, so why didn't the branch get rid of the caterpillar?
This soon became a problem, as the branches were still entwining themselves around each other, the caterpillar could more easily switch branches and eat leaves off of both branches. The first branch slowly started to move away from the second branch, in order to retain its precious leaves. The second branch, though strong, was not strong enough to avoid the clingy grasp of the caterpillar. The second branch did not see the first branches' example, so for the first time, the two branches grew apart.
This continued through the summer, into the very late summer, when the power of the caterpillar overwhelmed the second branch and started to disease the second branch. The second branch soon grew totally apart from the first, with the first branch continuing to try and entwine itself around the second.
This effort was to no avail. The second branch soon became so diseased that the knot where the two branches were connected became infected and the wood became weak. One day, the wood broke, and both the first and second branch went crashing down onto the people who rested below. They struck the people, and crashed apart from each other, the second branch rolling down the great slope the garden was on, and out of sight. The first branch lay there for the rest of the tree’s life, still loving its people, but not the way it had loved the other branch.
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