A New Earth

This wonderful spiritual guide, “A New Earth”, by Eckhart Tolle is a precious gift I received a few months ago.  The kind of book you cannot ever part from.  A book that may well change your way of looking at life, people, events.  At yourself first of all.  I take my time reading it because of the profound spiritual writing E. Tolle is sharing with us.  I read it slowly because I like to underline some parts of the text for a second reading.  Or more. Many passages are so meaningful to me that I like to write them down in my diary. Written thoughts leave a deeper imprint on my memory. Some lines are worth re-reading, each in its own time and place.  Like the ones below about “Chaos and higher order” in the chapter “Finding who you truly are” :

A few excerpts from E. Tolle’s writings…”When we go into a forest that has not been interfered with by man, our thinking mind will see only disorder and chaos all around us… Only if we are still enough inside and the noise of thinking subsides can we become aware that there is a hidden harmony here, a sacredness, a higher order in which everything has its perfect place and could not be other than what it is and the way it is”.“…In the forest, there is an incomprehensible order that to the mind looks like chaos. It is beyond the mental categories of good and bad. You cannot understand it through thought, but you can sense it when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don’t try to understand or explain. Only then can you be aware of the sacredness of the forest… You realize you are not separate from it, and you become a conscious participant in it. In this way, nature can help you become realigned with the wholeness of life”.

These quotes from E. Tolle’s “A New Earth” take their full meaning as I walk through the woods, almost daily. Without realizing it concretely, the forest no matter where I walked through it, always appeared harmonious and beautiful in its own “disorder”, its natural state. Better than in any park or botanical garden (although I enjoy them a lot too) I found myself “aligned” with life, as Tolle writes. A deeply beautiful feeling.

forgotten strips

There was this old wooden trunk that had sat in the garret for ages.  I knew it belonged to a family member who had travelled to North America in the late 19th century. He and his family settled somewhere in the state of Wisconsin, and lived  there for quite  a few years. For unknown reasons to me, part of the family came back to Europe (France). Again the sea trunk was part of the journey  home. It was transported here and there along the  years and the various movings until I received it from my own grandfather before he left for his own journey. And since then the trunk has been waiting patiently, up in the garret of the house until someone curious would open it !

I did so a few years ago  and was very surprised to find several sorts of thin and colourful materials (lining). Some of them were already cut and sewn together in narrow strips, others lay untouched on the flowery paper that covered the inside of the trunk. I have no idea who could have sewn these pieces of fabrics together, nor what their use would have been. On a cool and grey weekend I  decided to start sewing them together. Just the way the strips of materials  were assembled, sometimes adding a piece here and there to get more or less  the same lenght. Here is the beginning of a wall hanging (maybe but maybe not?) I sewed with some of these forgotten strips. More are waiting to be added.

I am not sure yet how this pannel will look like when all the fabrics will be sewn together.  But I am  so enjoying the journey though !  The crossing over the Atlantic in a ship of  La Compagnie Transatlantique where many other hopeful passengers had embarked for a new life in America. Then travelling further from New York to Wisconsin,  finding work, settling down, raising a family, learning a new language and way of life. All so different from the mountainous forest area they had left back home.  Years later the family separated, the children stayed in America, the parents came back to Europe. If the trunk could speak… what stories would it tell ?