Forest of Memories

In the dense forest of good memories arising from a single human mind, the mother tree of memories stands rooted to her spot, utterly disoriented. Why has she been feeling her life force draining out lately? Why are her leaves drying up and flowers refusing to blossom?

She is the epicenter of this forest. Born from the first breath of her human host, she is his first good memory of basking in maternal warmth. All these trees circling her in a tight embrace are her children, born from her own thoughts over many years.

All her children were born of beautiful memories only. Colourful flowers and juicy fruits sprang from them. Majestic birds of paradise sang from their branches of the memories of love, generosity and acts of bravery of her heroic children.

Despite being surrounded by such perfection, why was she diseased and dying?

Unable to move, but determined to get to the root of the matter literally, there was only one way to find out. For the first time since she was born, she started observing her breath.

Mother nature had taught her this survival technique when she was just a seed in the mind of man. Every breath she inhaled carried with it information from the vast cosmos. Every breath she exhaled gave her information about her own own self and her children.

One by one the illusions started to fall, like giant oaks to the razor edge of a forceful axe. The sight was far from pretty. Her ancient wooden heart ached when she saw her children as they actually were, not the way she had perceived them to be.

Each tree was as different as every thought she ever had. Yes, there were beautiful flowering trees graced by birds of paradise.

But, who were these other eerie trees? She had never seen them before.

There were some deformed, half grown trees that never reached their full glory. They started off strong and ambitious. But, manipulative creepers of fear of failure crippled their growth midway. Their bare branches were frozen in time serving no purpose. They were too scared to grow tall or to wither away.

The mother tree had always imagined her forest to be bright and happy. But, her breath guided her to pitch dark corners that she had never encountered earlier. Being a tree, she had always taken sunlight for granted. She was startled to meet her own children who were born from the darkest shadows of her thoughts….thoughts she had completely buried away and forgotten.

She noticed that these trees of her dark memories were almost as strong as the trees of positive memories. The flowers they bore were more colorful and the fruits were juicier, but both were poisonous.

Venomous snakes embraced their gnarled branches. Rats burrowed into their claw like roots. Little messengers that carried news of brave new saplings springing forth with good intentions and innocence towards the light of glory.

The trees of dark memories were scheming among themselves. What if these saplings could be intoxicated with narcissism, ego and a hunger to be the greatest, all the while thinking they are doing good for the world? After all, they needed to pass on their memories of betrayal, anger and sin to the next generation. Unlike the ageless trees of positive memories that outlived their human host, they knew that they were as mortal as the humans in whose mind this forest of memories existed.

Born of a mother tree that set out to do good for the world, all her children were seeded with the same ambition. But, along the way some trees forgot what it was to be a tree. Instead of seeking out light in the dark, they resigned to darkness. Instead of nurturing each other and new saplings, they only started nurturing their own ego. In the process, despite growing into strong trees, unlike their sibling trees of good memories who could survive without support, they were only parasites that still fed off the mother tree and the energy of innocent saplings. No wonder she was diseased and dying. Her own children born from her shadows were using her energy to strengthen themselves and sabotage her and her newborn.

Also, they were masters of dark magic and illusions. They laughed as they boasted at how they had tricked their own mother into believing that they were trees of good memories and that the snakes coiled around them were birds of paradise.

The conversations of the scheming trees was suddenly interrupted by a distinct sensation of their mothers angry breath down their hunched necks. Breath to breath with their mother’s fury for the first time, the trees of dark memories quivered. They were only as strong as their mother allowed them to be.

With every breath, the mother tree could sense their toxicity and desperate need for parasitic survival. As a mother she was torn. How would they even know what light and warmth was when all they ever felt was an Arctic chill?

Was it their fault that they were born out of her darkest thoughts? Veiled by her own ego, she had failed to recognise her own dark thoughts. She had failed to realise that to maintain her image as a tree of positive memory, she had buried seeds of negative memories hoping they would never become trees.

Growing rapidly like weeds, now the trees of dark memories far outnumbered the trees of positive memories and threatened their survival. In the democratic world of humans whose mind she inhabited, the law of the greatest good of the greatest number prevailed. Since she was a bearer of human memories, should she follow the democratic process and allow the trees of dark memories to survive?

Or should she follow the natural law of the greatest good of all?

After all, this was her forest. She could do whatever she chose to. She decided against numbers and chose to favour the laws of mother nature.

With a silent prayer to mother nature to heal her shadow children, with gentle breaths that had a laser sharp precision, but also bore a maternal warmth, she started cutting off the dense umbilical cords that connected her to the roots of the trees of dark memories.

One by one, the rats scurried out of the roots and the snakes started slithering down at lightning speed. They went in search of forests in other human minds where dark memories still ruled supreme.

Like a row of dominoes, the trees of dark memories started crumbling down at their mother’s feet while the wise trees of good memories stood guard and the half grown trees looked on fearfully. They had to either overcome their fear of failure and head for light or meet the same fate.

Rays of sun streamed in where they once stood, gently detoxifying them and the land where they once stood.

The mother tree watched as Mother Nature sent her army of worms and microbes to release her shadow children back to their uncontaminated elements of air, water and earth.

She reflected on how all her thoughts had its origins in nature. If the thought helps nature nurture better, it will continue to flourish. But any thought derived from nature that goes against nature will be released back to nature and recycled for better use.

The hitherto unguarded forest of memories now had a new watch guard. Breath. It formed an impenetrable membrane around the mind of the mother tree. Henceforth, no thought would enter her forest without permission from her breath. No more children will be sired by dark thoughts and hidden by illusions. Destructive as her shadow children may have been, her heart was still damp with sorrow at the children she gave birth to and lost. They had left a deep imprint on her forest floor that would be very difficult to erase.

She instructed her breath to examine every young sapling for signs of contamination. They were still young and could be guided to light by the wise trees of positive memories.

As for the half grown trees, they still had a choice to come out of their ego based fears and complete their dreams of blossoming and bearing fruit.

As the wind rustled her leaves and a gentle drizzle moistened her branches, the mother tree slowly woke up from a deep, meditative sleep. Her energy was restored. Her decaying branches had healed and her leaves were green again. The birds of paradise that had deserted her while she was immersed for years in her false ego of perfection had returned to sing their songs of good memories again. It suddenly dawned on her that she had narrowly escaped slipping into the toxic world of her shadow children herself. Intuitively, she realised that her children of dark memories felt orphaned and were about to claim her for themselves forever. In a symbiotic loop, the shadow children she gave her life energies to, fed her back with their toxic energy because that’s all they had to offer.

As night fell, a wise owl flying past the forest of memories turned its neck 180 degrees in surprise. The dark bubble of illusions that it’s sharp eyes witnessed daily was replaced by an illuminiscent white membrane of pure breath. The owl knew that this forest of memories would be the perfect place for her to roost and create her own memories. With her sharp beak she knocked on the impregnable membrane of breath. After a thorough scrutiny, the membrane of breath recognised her to be a wise being and guided her to perch on a branch of the mother tree. This was the start of a glorious friendship of thought, breath and wisdom.

Months later, the forest of memories was thriving again. This time the bliss was not due to ignorance, but born of a fertile partnership of wisdom, breath and nature.