The river of tears and the tree of life...

One image can birth a story.

And thank God, 'cause--from where I sit--people need this story.

Have you noticed the unceasing river of tears that lurks within people?  It doesn't show itself that often, but every once in a while you say something and--cue the weeping and exposition of soul--the person breaks.

My wife knows a lady who's going through a really tough spot these days. All Nik does is ask how she's doing and the river overruns its banks.

Sorrow.

Everybody is so sad.  

Lemme' tell you.  This is one of the THE primary motivations for doing what I do. I see the river, I feel the river, I hear it, sense it, smell it and want (nay, NEED) to do something about it.

All these people drowning.  Somebody's got to throw them a line.

What does the line look like?

A Tree.

"A tree?"

Yes, a Tree.

The 'Tree of Life' to be specific.  It still exists I think.  Somewhere in some farmer's field it lingers, as strong and tall as the day the Master Maker called it forth from the dust of the garden in the east of Eden where He put the Man.

(can you tell I'm preaching from Genesis these days?)

Lovely Tree.  Glorious Tree.  Tree that will have it's final transplant when the Master Maker takes it from that fallow field and re-plants it in Zion, outside the gate made of a pearl lit by translucent streets of finest gold that reflect the light of the Master Himself.

(...For they will need no light of Sun or Moon there for THE LORD HIMSELF will be their light...)

Oh yeah, don't tell me you're not feeling it!

And what runs along beside that Tree in the new Jerusalem?

A river.

Heck yes, a RIVER!!  Put that in your cup of tears and smoke it!

BOOYAH!

See, the river of tears is testimony to the fact that the tree still 'is'.  You wouldn't be sad if you didn't know in the guts of you that happy 'is' possible.  You wouldn't miss 'happy' if that wasn't the way you were built to be.  You wouldn't pine for the garden if you hadn't come from there. Your soul wouldn't salivate like it just did reading about the tree and the pearl and the streets and the never ending cleansing light from the Master if you didn't still have some of that tree's nourishment lingering in the DNA you inherited from our first parents.

Pity the materialist.

To him/her the river of tears is just sorrow.

To me (to you?) it's a promise.  A promise of things to come.

Did you hear?  Seven farmers just discovered seven saplings in their fields.  Trees so old they can't be dated.  They'd never bloomed before, then all of a sudden, today they started blooming, all at the same time and all the same kind of fruit.

A fruit never seen before.  A fruit that one farmer took to his sickly daughter as she lay at home waiting to die.  They'd just brought her home from the hospital that day.  Better to pass away at home with your dolly in your arms then surrounded by linoleum...

(Think I'll open on a dusty road with an old ambulance driving slowly--'cause what's the rush? she's nearly dead--on it, headed for the farm.  The echo of that image--a road--will come back later in the film when we'll see 'THE ROAD' that leads to 'home' unveiled as the sky splits)

She couldn't even properly bite it, so he crushed it for her and--as the juice of it touched her lips--the cancer left her.

She was swinging under that tree by sunset.

Gotta' write me a treatment.

Do not lose hope my non-materialist friends.  There is a river, yes, but there is a Tree also.

Yes there is.  It's there.  Believe me.  

WOOOO!

T