Bda:

Well put!

Thanks for the weekly photo!  I just spent two weeks in your neck of the woods - much to enjoy and do! Very beautiful part of the Country!

Wordsmith:

You're so right.

Having spent much of my childhood in the Canadian Rockies and the ranges to the west of them, I remember going past vast stretches of burnt off woods.  Often lightning (or some careless person's cigarette) would strike on a dry summer's day and set light to hundreds of acres of forest.   It was a stark landscape, black stripped trunks pointing to the sky from equally black earth below.

Almost immediately, though, the green shoots of new trees would begin poking through the ashen rubble and in a few years the forest would be renewed and better than it had been.

I think you're right, Bill, that we need sometimes to perform this same Phoenix-like act of renewal in our own lives.  You've said it simply and eloquently and so correctly.

Thanks.

TimberAllen:

Love that analogy.

Well said indeed.

In order to grow the new, sometimes we've got to burn off the old.

“Nature often holds up a mirror so we can see more clearly the ongoing processes of growth, renewal, and transformation in our lives.”

-unknown