The Discernment of Dis-ease

I have walked past this tree many times this Summer, though I had never set eyes on it. 

I recently found myself being inwardly stopped as I passed by. 

Turning to see what has intuitively held my steps in place, I saw him. 

His nakedness saddened me, and I understood him to be another picture of my research question for the week, on leprosy, or rather the fear of 'death' - the Winter season - my Winter too.  I had been exploring this dis-ease from many views over the years, and had facilitated a contemplation towards this skin ailment for a local group. 

Historically, people with the disease leprosy were called lepers; people who were othered and placed in isolated places, so as not infect other people. Some people were considered to be more cleaner, more good, more generous ; or at least in the outer sense seen. 

Amidst this othering, there were some who were able to assist and heal the lepers too, such as St Francis of Assisi.  When he was approached by someone stricken with the disease, he held in his heart the recognition that the disease had come into being out of the separation from the spiritual. He also saw the deeper goodness within all human nature, as divine spiritual forces of healing.  St Francis developed his soul to be able to bring this truth to work on those stricken with skin diseases and other ailments. 

Towards people's questions about diseases, Rudolf Steiner who could listen to Nature speak, offered that "medieval leprosy was a physical manifestation by the migration of the Huns whose decaying astral and etheric remnants were absorbed into the skin of European populations. The Huns were remnants of ancient Atlantean peoples undergoing a spiritual and bodily process of decay. The terror and fear caused by the Huns, eventually translated physically into leprosy". Rudolf Steiner separately connected the physical condition and quality of human skin in a current life, as being directly related to the amount of deep thinking or intellectual activity a person preferred in a previous incarnation".  In Rudolf Steiner's indications of illness, the outer skin is a dis-ease of the soul. 

Many a times in my work accompanying children with additional needs of social inclusion, I have seen scratching at clothes due to skin sensitivity to the fabric's touch, and removing clothing altogether - rain, shine, or snow!

I pondered on the many garments of skin I had seen over the years and how the colours may have been different in other lives. This garment that one carries for the duration of the particular life story; I hear that it is the largest organ of the body, and that it is the border of one, and the many others we share this world with. It breathes air into and out of its inner spaces, and is a breath we all share. I wondered then of what the breath carries that touches each other, perhaps even without physical touch. What of the varying measures and temperatures of exhales and inhales. Having lived in London city for most of my early life, travel on the tube trains were tricky during the Summers, and touch and breath were one, whether we liked it or not.  It felt uncomfortable to find my breathing caught out; stuck; heavy - almost as if I was dying - when perhaps I was being buried closer to the soil of my heart. 

Naturally inspired, intuited, and imaginative meanings of death can be a helpful way to embrace all the movements of ongoing Life, then Life can weave rightly through the many kinds of thoughts, feelings, interactions, and speech. With each change, there can be a sense of rejection by what is being left behind and may need to be. Whether this is a relationship, a home, a job, a belief, the 'othering' may be helpful for the next steps of our search. 

Increasingly, I look back in wonder and gratitude for the times I had left something or someone, and when someone had to leave me.

Sometimes, it can feel like an ending can be experienced as an apocalypse, a word that can mean end-of-times, or an unveiling, a revelation, where an outdated thought-form is made conscious. 

The tree stood alone exposed; naked. As I looked around at the leafy green trees aligned on the road nearby, I wondered if this tree felt any envy, sadness. 

Whilst animals and people have a soul full of desires, Nature simply gives freely and harmoniously, in a cyclical way. Then why had this tree shed his leaves so soon, I wondered?  Had something terrified him?  Was he ill? diseased? lonely? dying? 

I wondered if the tree realised his nakedness, and felt ashamed like an emperor who was found out to have no clothes on!

I noticed a cluster of green leaves at the bottom by his trunk - Hope! 

Through the decaying and dying, new life does arise.

I resolved to lay my hand on his dry bark, promptly feeling a response within me. 

His roots were deep and connected to many of his neighbours, and life-forms frozen in Time - within the Earth.  He was not alone at all and through my touch and exhale, neithehr was I.

I resolved to check in on him in the Spring. 

Ref: GA 155. The Spiritual Foundations of Morality