But the final slides of the presentation kept pounding on my spirit, making me remember how we have lost our innocence while riding the weirdest dreams, fads and fictions, so widely spread around by the manipulating voices and screens of the omnipresent multimedia.
The pounding words were the following: “Run, little horse” evokes all that innocence of our childhood, when a simple wooden stick changed itself unto a dashing horse, taking us into fantasy worlds.
And what a better moment than Christmas to ride into those papery hilly Bethlehem, with cardboard and cork little houses, mirror wells full of little ducks swimming to see Child Jesus, and when we went early to bed on the 24th. to wake up and see the gifts asked for in our whishes letters?
I wanted to end the message with the sincerest desire that flowed from the bottom of my heart, wishing peace and happiness to all in this coming year. But I could not spread it out as I so intensely desired.
Some commercials, using the cherubic faces of some children stopped me from doing, because they made me realize the crudest manipulation of the innocence of the children we still have hidden in the deepest corners of our human being.
The innocence proclaimed 
What it irked my conscience most was the pounding exhortation to live in a make believe and play state of mind, immersed in a whirling and subliminally mesmerizing artificial world. Because life is not like that! In life we never get anything without paying the price or enduring the consequences of hasty, unrealistic or unreasonable decisions.
But nowadays everything is about rights, which is good, but not when responsibilities are ruled out, and replaced by what is being called tolerance to people´s choices, independently of how weird, unnatural or twisted they could be.
Consequently, everything becomes turned around and angry attitudes and fists up in the air take the place of ethics on both sides, the upper and the lower levels of society, turning everyone, the abusers and the abused, into the perpetuators of the social chaos, and “make believe” environment, that is asphyxiating societies.
Everyone expects life to keep on giving, even if undeserving, and without any impulse for mutual respect and gratefulness. And this is superbly shown in the trees and the one time child friend tale´s words, expressed as follows.
THE APPLE TREE! It was a big one and a little child loved to play around, and climb it to the top. They loved each other but the child grew up, stopped playing, and left.
One day he came back and the tree joyfully asked him… are you playing with me, again? But the boy said he was not a child any more, and he just wanted money to buy the toys he liked.
The tree then told him to take its apples to sell them and get the money he needed for his toys. The boy did so, sold the apples, got his toys and the tree was happy. But the boy left without looking back, and the tree was sad again.
The boy became a man. One day he passed by, and the tree asked him, again have you, this time, come to play? The man answered: I do not have time to play. I have to work to buy me a house for my children and wife.
I am sorry, said the tree. I do not have a house to give. But you can cut my branches and build the house you want. The man cut all its branches, and went away to build his house, and did not come back, as he had done before. The tree was left sad and alone, again!
One summer day, now a mature man, he came again. The tree then asked him… will you have now time to play? The man answered… I am sad and getting old, and would like to have a boat to navigate and rest. Can you give me one?
The tree told him… cut my trunk, and build one, so you can be happy and sail. The man did so, built his boat and sailed away a long time, without looking back to the tree, not even once.
After many years he finally came back and the tree told him…
I am truly sorry, but I do not have apples to give you, anymore. The man replied… I do not have teeth to bite, nor strength to climb. I am really old, now!
With tears falling down the tree then told the man: I do not have anything else to give you, but my roots. The man tiredly answered... I do not need much anymore, just a place to rest.
Apparently this tale ended here. With an old man seeking just a resting place after wasting all his life chasing rainbows, failure after failure, as his navigating years do not show any sign of happy family sharing.
Apparently, again, just the end of the road for the older ones who do not share these modern values or refused to be part of the excitement of getting places, without regard to anything else, people or circumstances.
Some exchanges of opinion with some of my closer friendship circles in relation to tolerance and acceptance of the modern moral deviations have, when expressing my differing concerns, have almost made me feel, at times, like an old doomsday soothsayer crying wolf in the midst of dried and dead dunes´ desert.
There have been moments when I have felt inclined to just live quietly, not peacefully at the price of letting get down the drain the things I find illogical or undesirable, such as seeing little children exacting things from their parents, or even worse, parents more than willing to spoil their children to show through them a wrongful attitude of living beyond their means or needs.
The content of the message and the tree´s offering of what were left after giving all to an ungrateful or a least opportunistic friendship, made me realize three vital things, as real as life can be.
One is, that no matter how ungrateful we could have been God will always provide us with a resting place even if made of broken trunks and left over roots,
Another is that no matter what we have gone through, or how small, or apparently so, our leftover baggage could be, we will always have some advice to share for the good of the rest.
And the third, and the most important one, is that if we have lived with transparence and integrity as the parameters and rules of our behavior and beliefs, we will never be broken and wasted as the tree could have been, even if tried and temporarily overcome by the abuses of the strong… if we have generously given all.
Because we will regenerate from our broken pieces and become what He promises in Psalm 1:
The freshness and the optimism of the encouraging messages I usually receive became, again, like the invigorating breezes that refresh the spirit, and not the blizzard and the snowy storms that paralyze our usual way of living.
This tale of the generously giving tree is an interesting lesson about the ways of reaching our last stages of life. Let´s hope our life does not end as a wasted one and feeble and frustrated ways of being and spending our last days.
It shows us the last opportunities to profit from our errors to tell the younger how to avoid the mistakes that we have made. Tree roots, our experiences, are the best place to go back, for the older to rest, and then to pass them to the younger ones.
So, Come! Sit with me, laugh or cry when listening to my tales, but… take notice, you the younger and while resting, you the older ones: let´s hope that the experiences shared are learnt, and the values of love, integrity, work ethics up and down, gratitude and respect… enter once again into the awareness and recognition of humankind.
