Hap  Epsom got to Pine Cone Grotto early that Saturday morning in late May.  The past two years had flown by him like Lance Armstrong on a heavy dose  of muscle-building dope. His friend Havva had introduced him to the  trees after he helped her set up her booth at the Mindful Body Expo in  2007. The way he figured it, meeting Havva and her friends Sonny, Kenya,  Reem, and Zaela was like winning the lotto. He sat on the black bench  he usually sat on when he wanted time alone with the pine trees. The  first thing he did when he got comfortable was to suck in a big gulp of  pine tree air and send it through his body. His semi-deep voice made his  air-sucking sound loud enough to reach the senses of the three hungry  vultures making their first pass over the trees. Hap knew it was just  the birds and his 183-pound body in Pinewood at the crack of dawn. So he  looked at the healthy-looking seven pines and two oaks that stood in a  perfect military stance about ten yards in front of him. He felt an  energy within the trees. He read enough about trees to know that “trees”  was the name we had given them. They were really a group of roots that  had decided to express their consciousness by creating artistic branches  bursting with energy. Those branches ruled a world of color, birth, and  death within their reality. They not only responded to their  nonphysical roots, but they also responded and react to their physical  world. Hap looked at the bark of the two oaks in front of him, and he  remembered that each mass of twisted roots shared a common goal but the  roots didn’t always build roads for insects and homes for other forms of  consciousness in the same way. Hap looked at the finically fallen,  grayish-brown pine cones lying in a nest of newly fallen needles. The  pine cones owed their existence to those branches and clusters of  recyclable pine needles. Every pine cone was a one-of-a-kind art form  that expressed the physical personality of all the nonphysical roots  that created the physical form of what we call trees. Hap’s facial  muscles started to move peculiarly. His face looked that way whenever he  was thinking of the trees. His wrinkled forehead showed the bodily  beating he gave himself running around the world. But sitting on the  bench had nothing to do with his wrinkles. As he totally relaxed in a  sitting position on his favorite bench, he began an inner dialogue with  the trees.

“Grabala, I am aware of your consciousness now.  You and the other tree speakers taught me that trees are a distinct  kind of energy. You told me that the creative consciousness of trees  demonstrates the interconnectedness of everything. An interconnectedness  that gives them an underground network of roots and fungus that serves  as their alarm, gossip, and protection system. Each pine cone bud has  the wisdom of that underground network etched into its being. And it’s  in a language only the trees understand.”

Hap stopped his  inner conversation and opened his eyes. Grabala, Havva’s energy  personality, stood seven trees away from him. Her physical presence was  queen-worthy in the tree world. She stood sixty feet tall, and her  thick, grayish-black trunk had an almost endless number of branches that  covered themselves in clusters of green needles. Each needle cluster on  Grabala’s branches danced in the wind, waving a pine-cone-bud
baby.  Her bud-cone babies were forging a spot in their family cluster as they  shared birth with two or three other baby buds. Grabala’s pine cone  family seemed to have royal sap running through their DNA.

Hap  didn’t expect an answer from Grabala this time. He was just  daydreaming. He wasn’t talking to her yet. He was there to experience  the opening of Pine Cone Grotto, a five-acre pine and oak tree forest on  the bank of a clear-running stream in Pinewood. Hap felt at home at  Pinewood. The forty-acre botanical wonderland in Bellevue, Tennessee,  was his second home. He thought about how trees express their physical  presence in the world as he drank the last gulp of hazelnut decaf he’d  bought at 5:00 a.m. from Norm’s Donut Den.
The left-handed former  shoe executive held his right hand over his eyes so he could see each  tree swaying in beach-blanket glory as the sun hit them, and the wind  drenched them. But he kept a close watch on the vultures as he got up  and walked down the wide, river-stone path in front of the trees. Hap  started another dialogue:

“Only a few pine cones ever become  trees. Grabala said they stay in pine cone form until they are ready to  move to the next step of their physical journey. They are  electromagnetically absorbed by a tree’s root system, and they find  themselves being born first straight up and then hanging upside down on  the same branch or a related branch on the same or another tree again.”  Hap thought that was the same scenario humans experience living on  Earth. Hap felt alive as he told himself about the trees. His five  senses were tingling as his invisible inner senses came alive. When he  walked in front of those tall pine trees, he felt their energy. He felt  like the spark and flame at the same time. He experienced the intangible  presence of “no time,” along with a shot of “no-thing,” as D. T.  Suzuki, the Japanese professor of Zen Buddhism, liked to say. In other  words, Hap uncovered his four-dimensional reality by talking to the  trees.

He heard a gentle voice in his mind:
“The  vultures feel your presence. All animals have consciousness within them.  The present is their point of power. The present is the point of power  in all consciousness.”
The familiar inner voice was telling him  something about what he was doing and what he was thinking at that  moment. But his mind started to wander as the vultures disappeared.  Hap’s inner dialogue became a two-person conversation.

“That’s  how consciousness works, Hap. You’re in it one minute, and the next  minute you’re still in it, but you focus on another part of it, and you  are suddenly somewhere else, thinking about something else within the  consciousness you are aware of.”

Hap heard himself say  consciousness over and over again. That was the word that really changed  his life at the expo. Hap chuckled as he answered the voice out loud.
“It  sounds funny to think a word is a life-changing experience, but change  is something we all do because we’re consciousness, I guess.”

Hap  sat back down on one of the black, wrought-iron-and-wood, two-person  benches in front of the trees. The gentle voice within him was clearer  now.

“When it comes to understanding consciousness, humans are at a chimpanzee level in this age of enlightenment.”

Hap  got a whiff of satisfaction from that inner thought as the wind grabbed  every physical aspect of the trees and mingled with each tree’s  multiple expressions. He thought it was almost like the wind was  depositing a nonphysical energy into the leaves, branches, needles, and  trunks. Hap took his focus off the trees when he heard a squirrel  chirping on a branch a few yards behind him. The squirrel’s chirping  triggered memories. For years, he thought his voice of reason was the  loudest voice in his head. Then he thought about what got him to  Pinewood in the first place. It wasn’t his voice of reason. It was his  lack of reason and his willingness to discover who he was that got him  there. Hap smiled as he began to mentally describe himself to himself.

“I’m  one of those recapaligion kids. Born in the fifties, went to Christian  school, and then went to college so I could make my capitalistic  fortune. I was a confused, brainwashed workaholic dipped in anxiety and  sprinkled with fake self-confidence. My old voice of reason was the  voice that told me to worship, squander, cheat, lie, and steal to get  what I thought would give me happiness.”

Hap looked up as  he stretched his farmer-tanned arms out in front of him. He didn’t see  the vultures, so he went back and remembered why he drank a river of  light beer before giving the wine industry a shot in the financial arm  for ten years.

Hap’s inner conversation didn’t stop.

“Thoughts  are a very useful commodity. Portions of your consciousness use  thoughts to create drama, fun, emotional episodes, and lottery wins. You  could say thoughts are a concentration of other thoughts that become  your thoughts when your perception mechanism leans a certain way.  Thoughts have different levels of energetic intensity.”
Hap thought  about the inner personality that ran through him. He finally understood  why he listened to his inner personality more often now. Hap knew that  communicating with a nonphysical energy personality is as ancient as  most of the ancient stories and symbols we consider as such. His inner  personality was at it again.

“Thousands of years ago, Hindu  meditation opened a door to nonphysical energy personalities. Even  before that, your cavemen communicated with energy personalities. Much  of the knowledge in the ancient books comes from the layer of  consciousness we inhabit. We want to help bring humanity out of  fairytale land.”

Hap was sure of it. There were too many  credible feelings to deny it. He got it now. The human spectrum of  consciousness is expanding. Every part of that spectrum is finding a way  to expand in its personal pool of perceptions. Hap thought that  becoming one with the vibe of allowance, appreciation, and abundance in  Pine Cone Grotto was his praying method. He quietly continued his  dialogue with his inner personality while he waited for the Acorn  Dressing Group to arrive.