A Quote by Thornton Wilder
The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
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Schoolchildren and older people like the idea of planting trees. For children, it's interesting that an acorn will grow into an oak, and for older people it's a legacy. And the act of planting a tree is not that difficult.
Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. It is not a movement of a special section or a special function of man's total being. They all are united in the act of faith.
If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it.
Let us face at the outset how many Christians are not victorious, but defeated. Defeated by circumstances, defeated by other peoples? natures and wrong-doings, defeated by the down-drag of the flesh, defeated by loss, by pain, by suffering, by worry. Instead of saying with confidence, ?This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith?, they have to say in honesty, ?This is the defeat that has been caused by the world, even our self-centeredness.? That is the opposite of faith. Unbelief is not the opposite of faith; self-centeredness is ? being centered in self rather than in God.
In the assemblies of the enlightened ones there have been many cases of mastering the Way bringing forth the heart of plants and trees; this is what awakening the mind for enlightenment is like. The fifth patriarch of Zen was once a pine-planting wayfarer; Rinzai worked on planting cedars and pines on Mount Obaku. . . . Working with plants, trees, fences and walls, if they practice sincerely they will attain enlightenment.
We urgently need more trees, but we appear to believe that the only means of restoring them is planting. We have a national obsession with tree planting, which is in danger of becoming as tokenistic as bamboo toothbrushes and cotton tote bags.
The very act of faith by which we receive Christ is an act of the utter renunciation of self, and all its works, as a ground of salvation. It is really a denial of self, and a grounding of its arms in the last citadel into which it can be driven, and is, in its principle, inclusive of every subsequent act of self-denial by which sin is forsaken or overcome.
I planted trees but the idea that you can offset carbon is nonsense - planting trees is more a way of acknowledging harm and apologising.
Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.
Could it be that those who were reared in the postwar years really were spoiled, as we used to hear? Did a child-centered generation, raised in depression and war, produce a self-centered generation that resents children and parenthood?
But freedom is the possibility of a total and centered act of the personality, an act in which all the drives and influences which constitute the destiny of man are brought into the centered unity of a decision.
The primary purpose of the Legislature in establishing "Arbor Day," was to develop and stimulate in the children of the Commonwealth a love and reverence for Nature as revealed in trees and shrubs and flowers. In the language of the statute, "to encourage the planting, protection and preservation of trees and shrubs" was believed to be the most effectual way in which to lead our children to love Nature and reverence Nature's God, and to see the uses to which these natural objects may be put in making our school grounds more healthful and at-tractive.
In the planting of the seeds of most trees, the best gardeners do no more than follow Nature, though they may not know it.
It would be easier to grow oak trees by planting marbles than for someone to be saved without the seed of the word.
My father grew up in an era when to be an American - a white American, at least - was to be yourself. In some respects, his generation was more ignorant, complacent, self-centered and parochial than mine.
Spraying to kill trees and and raspberry bushes after a clear-cut merely looks unaesthetic for a short time, but tree plantations are deliberate ecodeath. Yet, tree planting is often pictorially advertised on television and in national magazines by focusing on cupped caring hands around a seedling. But forests do not need this godlike interference... Planting tree plantations is permanent deforestation... The extensive planting of just one exotic species removes thousands of native species.
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