Mama's Home Remedies: Discover Time-Tested Secrets of Good Health and the Pleasures of Natural Livin by Svetlana Konnikova (series like harry potter txt) 📗

The little daughter of the house stood close by, and when she heard the words ‘late in the night,’ she said with great delight, “I also shall stay up till late in the night! We shall have a ball, and I shall wear my big red sash!”

How her face shone with joy! No wax candle can shine

like two childish eyes!

“That is a blessing to see,” thought the tallow

candle; “I shall never forget it and I shall certainly never see it again.”

Maybe the tallow candle referred to a garden or a fairyland where she could never return again? But we can always return to our once-discovered fairyland. We can come as often as we want into our Dream Garden, our favorite place outdoors, which we are able to find anywhere we go or we can create our own—a place where we can restore and enjoy the magic of Nature, relax, rejuvenate, and live a healthy life filled with great books, beautiful flowers, mighty trees, and loving people.

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How far that little candle throws his beams!

So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

—William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English playwright and poet ƒ

Victory is the beautiful bright colored flower.

—Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), British statesman, author, and prime minister ƒ

The flowers that bloom in the spring bring to us a new life.

—Unknown

ƒ

I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows.

—Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

ƒ

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance;

and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.

—Shakespeare, Hamlet

Trips to the Fairyland @ 227

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Chapter 12

Dialogue with the Trees of Strength

and Everlasting Life

Like a great poet, Nature is capable of producing the most stunning effects with the smallest means. Nature possesses only the sun, trees, flowers, water and love.

—Henrich Heine (1797–1836), German poet and critic

FACTS:

A forest is an ecosystem characterized by trees with a unique combination of plants, animals, microbes, soil, and climate. Twenty-seven percent of the world’s total land area is covered in forests, which are home to more species of animals, birds, plants, and insects than any other environment on Earth. In the United States alone forests cover 747 million acres (301 million hectares) or 33 percent of the land base. Each year the forestry community plants 1½

billion tree seedlings in North America. This means more than six new trees for each North American. Satellite surveys confirm that across North America forests have actually expanded by 20 percent since 1970.

Forests are big factories producing oxygen. We need this product for our survival. Forests are greenhouse exchangers and clean our air by absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. Trees lock in carbon dioxide and return it to the soil when they decompose instead of releasing it into the air and contributing to pollution. By taking in the amount of carbon we release into the atmosphere, trees help to reduce the “greenhouse” effect and remove Dialogue with the Trees of Strength and Everlasting Life @ 229

the “carbon debt” we put into the environment. To grow a pound of wood, a tree uses 1.47 pounds of carbon dioxide and gives off 1.07 pounds of oxygen. One large growing tree can provide a day’s oxygen for four people.38 Perhaps no other activity involves so many people as outdoor recreation, which is a major land use of a quarter of a billion acres of public land and as much private land. More than 90 percent of the population participates. It is a $20 billion a year industry with an annual government investment of an additional $1

billion.39

The Druids, the wise priests of ancient Gaul, Celtic Britain, and Ireland, believed that trees transfer vital energy to us. The degree to which trees give us energy is determined by our birth date. Their religion focused on the worship of nature deities, and their rituals and ceremonies were held mostly in oak groves. The Druids believed that each of us has our own biological field and that everyone corresponds to a tree that is similar to the characteristics of his or her own bioenergetics. This particular tree is our talisman, a guardian of our health.

My talisman, predestined by Mother Nature, according to the Druids, is the cypress tree. I had been intuitively attracted to cypress trees all my life, and so I now understand why. It was one of the mysterious forces which world scientists will explain to all of us some day.

My cypress was special, good-looking, fresh, and slender. He was as tall as a pyramidal tower of a castle built many years ago by the grandest architect in the world—Mother Nature. His upper branches stretched like crooked arrows to the sky. I saw his outstanding beauty for the first time as I walked down a lane of these cone-bearing giants that stood like courageous guards forming a long green wall.

July was hot and steamy in Crimea when I returned again to this centuries-old park for a vacation. At noon I took refuge in the shade where trees cast their shadows on the forest path. I approached one of my special cypress trees, which stood