OK troops, I need your help on this one.  Yesterday one of my life’s unanswered questions came up for me big time.  Once again I did not have a sufficient answer.  This morning I decided to turn to you, dear readership, to see if you might be able to shed a little light on the subject.

You see, I took a walk in the woods – Muir Woods to be exact — one of Northern California’s great redwood forests.  My wife, Julia, and I had a rare day off and after spending the morning being tourists at Fisherman’s Warf in San Francisco, decided to get in a little nature — literally.  Neither of us had ever been to Muir Woods and I had never experienced our country’s amazing giant redwood trees, though I had certainly read a lot about them and seen the pics.

So we walked among these giants for a couple of hours in awe of their splendor, their majesty and their lives.  The day was perfect — cool but warm, one of those Northern California days that make you realize the God must live in Northern California.  By the end of our walk my neck was stiff from looking to the heavens, my feet tired, and my brain in a frazzle.

At one point I stood before one family of mammoth trees and wept at the thought of them standing together in such incredible strength, waving softly in the wind as the world went by below for the last 1100 years or so.  Time shrunk and then expanded and then simply slipped away as I tried to wrap my mind around the magnitude of their trunks, their bodies, their lives as trees, their time on earth living, standing, waving in the sun.

Many years ago I took a beautiful red and orange fallen leaf to my spiritual teacher and, holding the leaf before him, I asked, “What is this?  If all matter is an illusion, then what is this that I hold in my hand?  What is God’s relationship to this illusion?  Did he make this?  If not, then who did?  I’m not sure I quite buy the idea that there is a mother out there somewhere named Nature who sits and makes leaves every day.  But if matter is unreal, then God perhaps does not even know about our human belief or misconception of this illusion called ‘leaf’.”

My teacher looked at me and smiled.  I, of course, expected a simple and bases clearing answer.  After all, he was the teacher and I had turned to him for all the answers of late.  Here’s the gist of what he said.  “God did not make or manufacture the leaf.  Let’s, rather, think of Him as the designer or even the design itself.  In other words, not the material object, but the thought behind it.”

I tried to imagine God sitting around all day in His workshop (sorta like Santa) designing leaves, but knew I was being childish, shallow and a bit silly.  As I have worked with these thoughts over the years, I have come to imagine that God created, not a leaf, but the logic for leaves, the intelligence for design, but not the actual leaf or even leaf blueprint.  God created the concept of creativity, but not the object of creativity – simply the ability to create.

In my case, as a composer, God gives me the creativity and I, in turn, pass on to you the song.  On the other hand I experience sometimes that God just says to me, “Oh hell, Pete, here’s the whole song kit and caboodle” and then just pours it through me.  In these cases, God is the creator and the manufacturer and I am simply the vessel.

Now we’re getting to the confusion of the day, you see.  Now you’re perhaps beginning to see the question.  Let me try to frame it.  Where does God’s work stop and ours start?  What does He or It do and what do we do?  How much of it all is God’s doing and how much of it is the redwood tree’s?  If matter is unreal and illusion and God, we must deduce, is no part of this unreality, then why even the supposition of the leaf, much less this magnificent tree?

This family of trees that I spent time with just yesterday was so beautiful, so full of goodness, so reflective of God’s goodness and eternal majesty, so huge in its life force, so much the creation of what could only be God’s.  To say that God had nothing to do with this tree would be, it seems at this moment, nothing short of blasphemous.  If there was ever a material representation of God’s creation, it seemed to me yesterday that this was one.

So what part does God play?  Doesn’t God play all the parts?  Then the real question is…?

Here I am and I don’t even know the real question.  So many questions, it’s hard to focus down to the one.  Guess I gotta go learn a little or a lot more, think it all out on a deeper level, hit the desert for forty days and forty nights.  Perhaps you have some thoughts on this.  Perhaps you can help clarify.

Why did these trees turn my thinking upside down when I thought I understood the leaf?  Aren’t they essentially the same?  Yes, but oh those trees and their majesty and the centuries of time and the alteration of space and the consideration of the universe all made for a most interesting walk in the woods.