So Shall All These

 "...so shall all these in their season pass away, and in their season be reborn again." Sermon of the Apple Seed, verse 8.

I've wanted to use this font for the longest time, but there's never a time to use it. It may not fit here too well either, but at last, I've gotten to use it! 😆

I've written before about how I like the Sermon of the Apple Seed: the mental picture it draws of a great celestial Tree which is the Truth that stands eternal, the apple on but one of its branches, that small apple that is the entirety of our knowledge. The imagery continues, as we are told "the apple turns from bud to bloom, from blossom to the fruit, ripens, matures, decays, and is reborn" -- the spheres of Creation form and fall, over and over.

I'd recently come across a page I bookmarked ages and ages ago for some research project. On the top was a quote "If you knew your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live?" It reminds me a lot of the Apple Seed. Monotheistic religions can tend to emphasize that this is but a passing moment, this life, that it is just one minor stage of a longer journey. Whether that journey ends entirely in some afterlife, or continues on in ways unexpected, or if there is nothing at all, injecting a little bit of that way of thinking can do a lot for us and the choices we make here and now. We don't get as attached to the things around us, or agonize over decisions that don't need it. Remembering it is all temporary, that it will fall and rise again -- it helps me to look at things anew and not fester over small wrongs, or live paralyzed by choices (or the fear of making the wrong choice!). It gets me to look at things with a little more levity so mole hills stop looking like mountains.

The Sermon of the Apple Seed, verses 7-9:
"For even as the apple turns from bud to bloom, from blossom to the fruit, ripens, matures, decays, and is reborn; so also shall the spheres and galaxies, the subtle realms, the sure and solid earth; so shall all these in their season pass away, and in their season be reborn. Thus has it been ten thousand times before, and countless times again, thus shall it be."