"We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."
Secrets poison the soul. A secret will crawl into a person, before they are even aware that it is there. It will curl around the heart, and let nothing else in. Secrets, if they are big enough, build walls between people, separating them from each other. Too many secrets isolate a person and keep them from their loved ones. Humans were never meant to keep secrets.
Yet the world is full of secrets. No matter who or how high in the world, there is likely a secret inside. Maybe a small secret, like a brownie filched from an untended plate. Maybe a big secret, like stolen money. Some have only a single secret, hidden away in the darkness. Others have many, many secrets, festering in the endless recesses that exist in the human heart.
Those secrets bring people to me, pulling them inexorably to stand underneath my canopy before they reach the end of their lives. They wait, staring up into the branches, wondering if they have the courage to give up what they have held so close for so long. It can take days to unfurl every tentacle of a secret, but it must be done. Secrets poison the soul, their walls hindering the passage to the afterlife. No soul can enter the Heavenly Presence stained, and those who cannot give up their secrets remain outside the doors until they come to me.
So the people come, and they whisper to me, as if we were familiar confidants. Some place their cheek on my bark, and hug my strength to them as they let go of what has kept them apart from the Creator. Once spoken, their secrets rise above them, floating into the air, pulled in among the leaves and branches. I take those secrets and weave them into new buds, tendrils of new growth. When I have reached the end of my span, when my leaves have fallen to dust and my branches turned black with the rot of the dead, all of the secrets will be absorbed into the earth, and a new sapling will emerge, to take my place.
Secrets poison the soul, but they also give the earth new life.
Secrets poison the soul, but they also give the earth new life.
