Joshua Tree Quotes

One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.

The world takes us to a silver screen on which flickering images of passion and romance play, and as we watch, the world says, “This is love.” God takes us to the foot of a tree on which a naked and bloodied man hangs and says, “This is love.

It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.

Ask the dust on the road! Ask the Joshua trees standing alone where the Mojave begins. Ask them about Camilla Lopez, and they will whisper her name.

The first seven years of the Joshua tree's life, it's just a vertical stem. No branches," she told me while we were hiking. "It takes years before it blossoms. And every branching stem stops growing after it blossoms, so you've got this complex system of dead areas and new growth." I used to think about that, sometimes, when I wondered what parts of her might still be alive.

4. Religion. Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object. In the first place, divest yourself of all bias in favor of novelty & singularity of opinion... shake off all the fears & servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. You will naturally examine first, the religion of your own country. Read the Bible, then as you would read Livy or Tacitus. The facts which are within the ordinary course of nature, you will believe on the authority of the writer, as you do those of the same kind in Livy and Tacitus. The testimony of the writer weighs in their favor, in one scale, and their not being against the laws of nature, does not weigh against them. But those facts in the Bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces. Here you must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from God. Examine upon what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so strong, as that its falsehood would be more improbable than a change in the laws of nature, in the case he relates. For example in the book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still several hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus we should class it with their showers of blood, speaking of statues, beasts, &c. But it is said that the writer of that book was inspired. Examine therefore candidly what evidence there is of his having been inspired. The pretension is entitled to your inquiry, because millions believe it. On the other hand you are astronomer enough to know how contrary it is to the law of nature that a body revolving on its axis as the earth does, should have stopped, should not by that sudden stoppage have prostrated animals, trees, buildings, and should after a certain time have resumed its revolution, & that without a second general prostration. Is this arrest of the earth's motion, or the evidence which affirms it, most within the law of probabilities? You will next read the New Testament. It is the history of a personage called Jesus. Keep in your eye the opposite pretensions: 1, of those who say he was begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended & reversed the laws of nature at will, & ascended bodily into heaven; and 2, of those who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition, by being gibbeted, according to the Roman law, which punished the first commission of that offence by whipping, & the second by exile, or death in fureâ. ...Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you... In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it... I forgot to observe, when speaking of the New Testament, that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us, to be Pseudo-evangelists, as those they named Evangelists. Because these Pseudo-evangelists pretended to inspiration, as much as the others, and you are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, and not by the reason of those ecclesiastics. Most of these are lost... [Letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, advising him in matters of religion, 1787]

The desert doesn't care who you are, and neither does anyone or anything who lives in it.

My favorite tree is the Joshua tree, which is named after me. Well, it will be, once I change my name to Joshua.

From the time the Joshua tree was a tiny sapling, it had been so beaten down by the whipping wind that, rather than trying to grow skyward, it had grown in the direction that the wind pushed it. It existed now in a permanent state of windblowness, leaning over so far that it seemed ready to topple, although, in fact, its roots held it firmly in place.

I want to run I want to hide I want to tear down the walls That hold me inside I want to reach out And touch the flame Where the streets have no name

The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.

I have climbed highest mountains I have run through the fields Only to be with you I have run I have crawled I have scaled these city walls These city walls Only to be with you But I still haven't found what I'm kooking for

And I can't tell the difference between ABC News, Hill Street Blues And a preacher on the old time gospel hour Stealing money from the sick and the old Well the God I believe in isn't short of cash, mister!

I think this is a bodhi tree,” I said, “just like Buddha sat under! It’s so exciting. I’m feeling sort of enlightened just standing here. Really, I can feel ripe bodhies squishing between my toes.” Joshua looked at my feet. “I don’t think those are bodhies. There was a cow here before us.” I lifted my foot out of the mess. “Cows are overrated in this country. Under the Buddha’s tree too. Is nothing sacred?

I'd probably love the sound that's made when an air guitarist gets struck by lightning while performing. I'd use that sizzle to flavor my Duck Soup. Of course, I'm open to seasoning my Duck Soup with other sounds, like Track # 3 from U2's classic 1987 hit album "The Joshua Tree." Though I might have to charge an additional $19.95 for such an exotic flavor.

I especially loved the Old Testament. Even as a kid I had a sense of it being slightly illicit. As though someone had slipped an R-rated action movie into a pile of Disney DVDs. For starters Adam and Eve were naked on the first page. I was fascinated by Eve's ability to always stand in the Garden of Eden so that a tree branch or leaf was covering her private areas like some kind of organic bakini. But it was the Bible's murder and mayhem that really got my attention. When I started reading the real Bible I spent most of my time in Genesis Exodus 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. Talk about violent. Cain killed Abel. The Egyptians fed babies to alligators. Moses killed an Egyptian. God killed thousands of Egyptians in the Red Sea. David killed Goliath and won a girl by bringing a bag of two hundred Philistine foreskins to his future father-in-law. I couldn't believe that Mom was so happy about my spending time each morning reading about gruesome battles prostitutes fratricide murder and adultery. What a way to have a "quiet time." While I grew up with a fairly solid grasp of Bible stories I didn't have a clear idea of how the Bible fit together or what it was all about. I certainly didn't understand how the exciting stories of the Old Testament connected to the rather less-exciting New Testament and the story of Jesus. This concept of the Bible as a bunch of disconnected stories sprinkled with wise advice and capped off with the inspirational life of Jesus seems fairly common among Christians. That is so unfortunate because to see the Bible as one book with one author and all about one main character is to see it in its breathtaking beauty.

There is talk of a new astrologer [Nicolaus Copernicus] who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that is how things are nowadays: when a man wishes to be clever he must . . . invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best! The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth. [Martin Luther stating his objection to heliocentrism due to his Scripture's geocentrism]

One night, I was out driving with a few friends of mine when the police pulled us over. We were told we fit the description of someone who had committed a robbery or stolen a car, though I don't really know what kind of description that could have been: three black kids in a Hyundai blasting U2's Joshua Tree on their way back from Bible study?

It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.

One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. “You’d be destroying what makes it special,” she said. “It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.

I type the words, Orchestral quiet. Then I observe the trees. All around are the Joshua trees, fairy-tale trees, inherently psychedelic: their twists and turns making them look like they are breathing. Of course, they are breathing, photosynthesizing, and transpiring, doing whatever it is that trees do.

Nevertheless, there was something extraordinary about it when a man so young, with so little experience in flight test, was selected to go to Muroc Field in California for the XS–1 project. Muroc was up in the high elevations of the Mojave Desert. It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. It was full of huge dry lake beds, the biggest being Rogers Lake. Other than sagebrush the only vegetation was Joshua trees, twisted freaks of the plant world that looked like a cross between cactus and Japanese bonsai. They had a dark petrified green color and horribly crippled branches. At dusk the Joshua trees stood out in silhouette on the fossil wasteland like some arthritic nightmare. In the summer the temperature went up to 110 degrees as a matter of course, and the dry lake beds were covered in sand, and there would be windstorms and sandstorms right out of a Foreign Legion movie. At night it would drop to near freezing, and in December it would start raining, and the dry lakes would fill up with a few inches of water, and some sort of putrid prehistoric shrimps would work their way up from out of the ooze, and sea gulls would come flying in a hundred miles or more from the ocean, over the mountains, to gobble up these squirming little throwbacks. A person had to see it to believe it: flocks of sea gulls wheeling around in the air out in the middle of the high desert in the dead of winter and grazing on antediluvian crustaceans in the primordial ooze. When

The mind’s preoccupation with things of space affects, to this day, all activities of man. Even religions are frequently dominated by the notion that the deity resides in space, within particular localities like mountains, forests, trees or stones, which are, therefore, singled out as holy places; the deity is bound to a particular land; holiness a quality associated with things of space, and the primary question is: Where is the god? There is much enthusiasm for the idea that God is present in the universe, but that idea is taken to mean His presence in space rather than in time, in nature rather than in history; as if He were a thing, not a spirit.

In that moment, I wanted to cut out all my sins from my body and lay them down upon the earth before you. Like pieces of bark they are rough and dead, once clutching onto my very skin, all a part of me. You make me want to strip myself bare and lay myself out to you, I want you to see all my flaws, I want you to know I am not beautiful, yet all the while wanting you to take me anyway. I am composed of things that are dead, I am not a tree, I do not give life, I am just bark, flaws, stitched together with hope for something more. I wish for love, I wish for more.

the plant that is the park’s namesake. The Joshua trees look hilariously alien. Like Satan’s telephone poles. They’re primitive, irregularly limbed, their branches swooning up and down, sparsely covered with syringe-thin leaves—more like spines, Angie notes. Some mature trees have held their insane poses for a thousand years; they look as if they were on drugs and hallucinating themselves.

Good behavior is often a means of keeping God at bay. Obedience and obligation can erect as much a barrier to life with God as lawless rebellion and wanton destruction. Duty and debauchery have more in common than we might expect. Selfishness and self-righteousness just might be twins separated at birth. Both good and evil hang from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; the problem is that they are on the wrong tree.

Dire?” the girl asks. And learns from the ranger that the Joshua trees may be on the brink of extinction. Botanists believe they are witnessing a coordinated response to crisis. Perhaps a drought, legible in the plants’ purplish leaves, has resulted in this push. Seeds in abundance. The ancient species’ Hail Mary pass. Yucca moths, attracted by the flowers’ penetrating odor, are their heroic spouses, equally dependent, equally endangered; their larval children feast on yucca seeds.

Are you some kind of tree police?” Joshua asked without opening his eyes. “Do you feel as if you have some kind of civic duty to come out here and—and—annoy the hell out of me?” “Well—yes—I do have a civic duty to stop you—that is—if you needed stopping. If you’d kept to simple tree assault, I would have just kept watching. It was fairly entertaining, in a train wreck kind of way. You’ve moved up to tree homicide.” “Homicide?” Joshua opened his eyes to give the man an annoyed glare. “That implies intent. At most, this is tree slaughter. Maybe even just reckless endangerment—it might not be dead.” They eyed the tree in silence. His kick had sheered the tree trunk off five inches from the roots, leaving behind a jagged white stump, flowing with sap. “No, that’s dead,” the man said. “Yeah.” Joshua had to agree. It occurred to Joshua that this person might be undercover cop or some off-duty park ranger or a very lost Canadian Mountie or something. He’d seen Joshua destroy a piece of public property worth hundreds of dollars. The man might try to arrest him. That wouldn’t end well for either one of them.

—Lo siento —dije. Alex abrió la boca para hablar y yo negué con la cabeza para detenerlo—. Alex, sólo escúchame. Necesito que entiendas. Cuando pensé que mi madre estaba muerta… su funeral… y los días posteriores, sólo conseguí lograrlo gracias a ti, porque estuviste justo a mi lado cuidándome. Y cuando mi padre me llevó a Londres, lo único que conseguía sacarme de la cama en la mañana, y a través de cada día en esa maldita escuela, era el pensamiento de que un día llegaría a verte de nuevo. Sólo saber que estabas por ahí, era suficiente. Así que, incluso antes de esto, incluso antes de que realmente comenzaras a rescatarme de los hombres malos con armas grandes, te necesitaba. He sido impulsiva y loca y aprovechado oportunidades toda mi vida porque siempre he sabido que estarías allí cuando las cosas fueran mal. Lo que pasa. Mucho.¿Recuerdas el lago? ¿El incidente del trineo? ¿El árbol en el patio trasero? Y ni siquiera hemos llegado a casi ser capturada por La Unidad en un Seven Eleven o recibir un disparo en Joshua Tree. Y en cada uno de esos momentos me has rescatado. Cada vez has estado allí. Eres como mi red de seguridad.

She should have been used to it by now, the lingering looks while people tried to work out the logistics of her family, the numbers and hedged words scribbled across their family tree. The giant Nigerian man was quite evidently her stepfather and Joshua her half-brother. But Pip didn’t like using those words, those cold technicalities. The people you love weren’t algebra: to be calculated, subtracted, or held at arm’s length across a decimal point. Victor and Josh weren’t just three-eighths hers, not just forty percent family, they were fully hers. Her dad and her annoying little brother.

Suddenly, I had a problem. Jesus wants to get rid of sex trafficking too, only he takes it a lot more seriously than I do. I want to get rid of sex trafficking; Jesus wants to get rid of lust. I want to prune back the wicked tree; he wants to dig out the root. And that wicked root is in me. I may not be a sex trafficker, a pedophile tourist, or a greedy madam—but I have lust. I can be one lusty animal. Jesus says if you even look lustfully at one of God’s daughters, demeaningly commodifying her as an object for your own self-centered gratification, then the power of hell has its roots in you, and when God arrives to establish his kingdom, you are in danger of being cast outside the kingdom with it.

She thinks she’s fighting against lethargy. She does jumping jacks in the motel courtyard, calls her best friend in Juneau from the motel pay phone and anxiously tries to reminisce about their shitty high school band. They sing an old song together, and she feels almost normal. But increasingly she finds herself powerless to resist the warmth that spreads through her chest, the midday paralysis, the hunger for something slow and deep and unnameable. Some maid has drawn the blackout curtains. One light bulb dangles. The dark reminds Angie of packed earth, moisture. What she interprets as sprawling emotion is the Joshua tree. Here was its birth, in the sands of Black Rock Canyon. Here was its death, and its rebirth as a ghostly presence in the human. Couldn’t it perhaps Leap back into that older organism? The light bulb pulses in time with Angie’s headache. It acquires a fetal glow, otherworldly.

There isn’t any room,” said Joshua. “You travel back along the line of time and you don’t find the past, but another world, another bracket of consciousness. The earth would be the same, you see, or almost the same. Same trees, same rivers, same hills, but it wouldn’t be the world we know. Because it has lived a different life, it has developed differently. The second back of us is not the second back of us at all, but another second, a totally separate sector of time. We live in the same second all the time. We move along within the bracket of that second, that tiny bit of time that has been allotted to our particular world.” “The way we keep time was to blame,” said Ichabod. “It was the thing that kept us from thinking of it in the way it really was. For we thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren’t, when we never have. We’ve just been moving along with time. We said, there’s another second gone, there’s another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.” Jenkins nodded. “I see. Like driftwood on the river. Chips moving with the river. And the scene changes along the river bank, but the water is the same.” “That’s roughly it,” said Joshua. “Except that time is a rigid stream and the different worlds are more firmly fixed in place than the driftwood on the river.

All the girl could remember was the terrible, irremediable tension between wanting to be somewhere and wanting to be nowhere. And the plant, crazed by its proximity to rich familiar soil, tried repeatedly to Leap out of her. This caused her hand to lift, holding a long knife, and plummet earthward, rooting into the fleshy chest of her lover, feeling deeper and deeper for moisture. The Joshua tree’s greatest victory over the couple comes four months into their stay: they sign a lease. A bungalow on the outskirts of the national park, with a fence to keep out the coyotes and an outdoor shower. When the shower water gets into their mouths, it tastes like poison. Strange reptiles hug the fence posts, like colorful olives on toothpicks. Andy squeezes Angie’s hand and returns the gaze of these tiny monsters; he feels strangely bashful as they bugle their throats at him. Four months into his desert sojourn, and he still doesn’t know the name of anything. Up close, the bungalow looks a lot like a shed. The bloated vowels of his signature on the landlord’s papers make him think of a large hand blurring underwater.

One Tree Hill" We turn away to face the cold, enduring chill As the day begs the night for mercy, love A sun so bright it leaves no shadows Only scars carved into stone on the face of earth The moon is up and over One Tree Hill We see the sun go down in your eyes You run like a river on to the sea You run like a river runs to the sea And in the world, a heart of darkness, a fire-zone Where poets speak their heart then bleed for it Jara sang, his song a weapon in the hands of love You know his blood still cries from the ground It runs like a river runs to the sea It runs like a river to the sea I don't believe in painted roses or bleeding hearts While bullets rape the night of the merciful I'll see you again when the stars fall from the sky And the moon has turned red over One Tree Hill We run like a river runs to the sea We run like a river to the sea And when it's rainin', rainin' hard That's when the rain will break a heart Rainin', rainin' in your heart Rainin' in your heart Rainin', rain into your heart Rainin', rainin', rainin' Rain into your heart Rainin', ooh, rain in your heart, yeah Feel it Oh great ocean Oh great sea Run to the ocean Run to the sea U2, The Joshua Tree (1987)

But that California trip was just a flash in the eye of that year. The rest of the time, I hung in purgatory, playing talent shows and showcases here and there, living like a normal teenager in Philadelphia. Or maybe I should say living like a normal black teenager, which meant that aimlessness was accompanied by a certain unique set of risks. One night, I was out driving with a few friends of mine when the police pulled us over. We were told we fit the description of someone who had committed a robbery or stolen a car, though I don’t really know what kind of description that could have been: three black kids in a Hyundai blasting U2’s Joshua Tree on their way back from Bible study? The officer actually drew a gun. I was terrified. The worst part of all was that when I saw the police in the rearview mirror, I started thinking that maybe I had stolen the car. I don’t know what the psychological phenomenon is called, exactly, but when you encircle someone with suspicion, the idea of guilt just starts to appear within them. It was a terrible feeling and it’s a terrible process, and it was another reminder that the life I was leading, while superficially uneventful, had the potential to turn against me at any moment.

I walked through the cemetery holding a bouquet of yellow and red flowers with brown combat boots, feeling grateful and bitter the sun was shining so brightly. I felt an urge to run, as well as a magnet to reach the group of people surrounding you. I wanted to be wearing white. I wanted to be walking down an isle with flowers and for this to be a different ceremony. I wanted to curl up beside the earth that held you, the pink and yellow petals, strings of ground hanging loosely in the wind and be beside you. I was angry you were buried, I resented the earth falling upon you. Each scoop felt heavy and indefinite. I'm not ready to know this is definite. I watched your chest, in a white linen shirt last night wishing for your chest to rise. But when I kissed your forehead it was cold. And when I held your hands it wasn't you. It was a shell. It was a vessel. It was empty. The first time I heard your new music it was by accident and your voice drove me from your home into hysterics. But when I entered your home and it played with your casket it was welcome. I read your letter with your mom and dad out loud beside you, and halfway through "spelunking in your soul" started to play. That was a gift, thank you. Today walking back from the funeral a green and black beetle landed in my hair and crawled onto my finger. I just had a bad moment with a woman in your life and I felt you in the little beetle. I'm writing something to be read at your celebration of life. It's not going to be read by me. I have a wedding in Joshua tree. But I will celebrate you in the desert there. I wanted to read the poem "sex and wine for breakfast" I wrote about you but figured I would go less steamy. I love you.

It’ll Get Worse Before It Gets Worse" For Alexander Moysaenko The black heart of the moon’s visible through the trees from here. Where are you? I’m alone on the road with a dead phone. The birds are flapping overhead but there’s not much light to be guided by. If any horizon becomes visible enough to follow. Forget the rain’s smear, the chafe of fabric at the calf. The money ran out. The diners are stuffed and back for more. Each terrible thing I said to the child will get repeated hopefully as a joke. And like language, these gestures, or a certain way of nodding one’s head, it all eases in with less than a breath. Forget the song’s words, the order of the band’s set tonight. The black moon’s heart’s got that sinister bent and I want to get touched at by the snakes. One of the students in my class used to go bear hunting with his two uncles. They played recordings of distressed animals to lure in tentative animals to kill. This practice is illegal in many places. Because it’s so very effective. I split open the apple and hand the good half to a child on the bus nestled in under the arm of her sleeping mother. Love from here is a long way to go. Get on your bike and ride through the lights. Poetry (March 2019)

In the earliest strand of the conquest narratives, Joshua's violence was associated with an ancient Canaanite custom called the "ban" (herem). Before a battle, a military leader would strike a deal with his god: if this deity undertook to give him the city, the commander promised to "devote" (HRM) all valuable loot to his temple and offer the conquered people to him in a human sacrifice. Joshua had made such a pact with Yahweh before attacking Jericho, and Yahweh responded by delivering the town to Israel in a specular miracle, causing its famous walls to collapse when the priests blew their rams' horns. Before allowing his troops to storm the city, Joshua explained the terms of the ban and stipulated that no one in the city should be spared, since everybody and everything in the town had been "devoted" to Yahweh. Accordingly, the Israelites "enforced the ban on everything in the town, men, and women, young and old, even the oxen and sheep and donkeys, massacring them all." But the ban had been violated when one of the soldiers kept booty for himself, and consequently the Israelites failed to take the town of Ai the following day. After the culprit had been found and executed, the Israelites attached Ai again, this time successfully, setting fire to the city so that it became a sacrificial pyre and slaughtering anybody who tried to escape: "The number of those who fell that day, men and women together, were twelve thousand all (the) people of Ai." Finally Joshua hanged the king from a tree, built a monumental cairn over his body, and reduced the city to "a ruin for ever more, a desolate place, even today.

So his armorbearer said to [Jonathan], “Do all that is in your heart. Go then; here I am with you, according to your heart.” 1 SAMUEL 14:7 Five simple monosyllables—“here I am with you”—but they helped make the difference between success and failure. Jonathan had already won a battle, for which his father, King Saul, took the credit (1 Sam. 13:1–4), but he didn’t care who got the credit so long as God received the glory and Israel was protected. As God’s people, we have always been in conflict with the enemies of the Lord and we have always been outnumbered. There were three kinds of Israelites on the battlefield that day, just as there are three kinds of “Christian soldiers” in the church today. There are those who do nothing. King Saul was sitting under a tree, surrounded by six hundred soldiers, wondering what to do next. Leaders are supposed to use their offices and not just fill them (1 Tim. 3:13). God had given Saul position and authority but he seemed to have no vision, power, or strategy. He was watching things happen instead of making things happen, and spectators don’t make much progress in life. Along with Saul and his small army were a number of Israelites who had fled the battlefield and hidden themselves, and some had even surrendered to the enemy! When Jonathan and his armorbearer started defeating the Philistines and the Lord shook the enemy camp, these quitters came out into the open and joined in the battle. Do you know any Christians like that? Are you one of them? There are those who fear nothing. Jonathan had already won a battle against the Philistines and was a man of faith who was certain that the God of Israel would give his people victory. Perhaps he was leaning on God’s promises in Leviticus 26:7–8, “You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight.” He assured his armorbearer that “nothing restrains the LORD from saving by many or by few” (1 Sam. 14:6). Jonathan expected God to give him a sign that his strategy was right, and God did just that (vv. 9–14). God also caused an earthquake in the enemy camp that made the Philistines panic, and they began to attack each other; and the enemy army began to melt away (v. 16). There are those who hold back nothing. Jonathan’s armorbearer is mentioned nine times in this narrative but his name is never revealed. Like many people in Scripture, he did his job well but must remain anonymous until he is rewarded in heaven. Think of the lad who gave his lunch to Jesus and he fed five thousand people (John 6:8–11), or the Jewish girl who sent Naaman to Elisha to be healed of his leprosy (2 Kings 5:1–4), or Paul’s nephew whose fast action saved Paul’s life (Acts 23:16–22). The armorbearer encouraged Jonathan and promised to stand by him. All leaders, no matter how successful, need others at their side who can help expedite their plans. Aaron and Hur held up Moses’s hands as he prayed for Joshua and the Jewish army in battle (Exod. 17:8–16), and Jesus asked Peter, James, and John to watch with him as he prayed in the garden (Matt. 26:36–46). Blessed are those leaders who have dependable associates whose hearts are one with theirs and who hold back nothing but devotedly say, “I am with you.” Jesus says that to us and he will help us to say it to others. I am with you always, even to the end of the age. Matthew 28:20

Would that life were like the shadow cast by a wall or a tree,” says the Talmud, “but it is like the shadow of a bird in flight.” Trying to clutch the past to our hearts is as futile as trying to embrace the passing shadow of a bird in flight.

How to scale and enter the risen path was largely unknown. It all might begin in darkness, but it cast a shadow that, when viewed from the ground, was too bleak. Demolition was once a question not of “whether, but when,” until one photographer spent a year on the trail documenting what was there. 4 The scenes were “hallucinatory”—wildflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, irises, and grasses wafted next to hardwood ailanthus trees that bolted up from the soil on railroad tracks, on which rust had accumulated over the decades. 5 Steel played willing host to an exuberant, spontaneous garden that showed fealty to its unusual roots. Tulips shared the soilbed with a single pine tree outfitted with lights for the winter holidays, planted outside of a building window that opened onto the iron-bottomed greenway with views of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty to the left and traffic, buildings, and Tenth Avenue to the right. 6 Wading through waist-high Queen Anne’s lace was like seeing “another world right in the middle of Manhattan.” 7 The scene was a kind of wildering, the German idea of ortsbewüstung, an ongoing sense of nature reclaiming its ground. 8 “You think of hidden things as small. That is how they stay hidden. But this hidden thing was huge. A huge space in New York City that had somehow escaped everybody’s notice,” said Joshua David, who cofounded a nonprofit organization with Robert Hammonds to save the railroad. 9 They called it the High Line. “It was beautiful refuse, which is kind of a scary thing because you find yourself looking forward and looking backwards at the same time,” architect Liz Diller told me in our conversation about the conversion of the tracks into a public space, done in a partnership with her architectural firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and James Corner, Principal of Field Operations, and Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. Other architectural plans proposed turning the High Line into a “Street in the Air” with biking, art galleries, and restaurants, but their team “saw that the ruinous state was really alive.” Joel Sternfeld, the “poet-keeper” of the walkway, put the High Line’s resonance best: “It’s more of a path than a park. And more of a Path than a path.” 10

Both good and evil hang from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; the problem is that they are on the wrong tree. But there is good news. There is another tree: the tree of life. Where life is received from God, rather than sought independently from him. Where all is given, nothing is earned. At the tree of life, the moralist needs the mercy of God as much as the murderer, the Pharisee as much as the philanderer, the legalist as much as the lawless. Being a good, upstanding citizen who follows all the community’s rules and earns the respect of one’s peers is not the criterion by which one enters life with God. God’s mercy is. Jesus’ cross is the life-giving tree. It is the place where our sin, rebellion, and destruction are absorbed and mercy made the basis for entrance into the life of God. Jesus invites us to let go of our independence and be bound in union with him, to stop eating off the tree of good and evil and start feasting on the tree of life: his life.

Jesus calls us to holiness and justice. Holiness involves dealing with the spark, the poisoned well, the root in our own hearts. Justice involves dealing with the wildfires, the raging rivers, the wicked trees in our world. Holiness and justice are the tools Jesus has given us to join his fight against the power of hell. These are the inseparable pathways through which he calls us to follow him. Together, they are means by which the church proclaims its resurrected King and bears witness to his good kingdom that is coming soon to reconcile heaven and earth and redeem the world.

Mom painted dozens of variations and studies of the Joshua tree. We'd go with her and she'd give us art lessons. One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.

Mom frowned at me. “You’d be destroying what makes it special,” she said. “It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.

The heart is our problem too. The power of hell resides in our hearts and makes its way into the world through us. Our distorted worship is the root that sprouts the wicked tree. Our corrupted affections are the spark that threatens to set the world aflame. Our vice is the tool that builds Babylon. The heart of the problem is the problem of the heart.

You’d be destroying what makes it special’ she said, ‘It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty’.

From the time the Joshua tree was a tiny sapling, it had been so beaten down by the whipping wind that, rather than trying to grow skyward, it had grown in the direction that the wind pushed it. It existed now in a permanent state of windblownness, leaning over so far that it seemed ready to topple, although, in fact, its roots held it firmly in place.

Hosbitaii may have originally evolved from plants, they don’t consider our plant life as having consciousness. Apparently the Hosbitaii attempted to communicate with a prickly pear when they first landed, with predictably bad results, and Indy apparently spent a half hour trying to convince a Joshua tree to drive him to a tsurrispoinis before he abducted you, so the Hosbitaii have decided that plants are too far down the evolutionary scale to count. I got the idea they’re annoyed by that, as if their own side had let them down.

this thing isn't capable of infecting trees or horses or anything, right?

A huge tree, hundreds of feet around had grown up into the clouds high above her. Its roots at the ground level were serpentine, twisted around like a tangled pile of, well, the only thing she could think of was snakes. She wondered if the mushrooms were distorting her vision, but she was not sure. She was surprised that she had not seen this tree from a distance and wondered why it was the only living thing in this little valley of deadness. “That, my dear Arisha,” said Izbaxl, “is Gaia, the Mother Earth Goddess. The World Tree. And those are her worshippers.

A seven-armed golden lampstand is perpetually aflame with holy oil to light the tent. It is shaped like a blossoming almond tree, a symbol of the tree of life in the Garden of Eden so long ago. But it is also considered the ‘light of the world’ that gives light to all men.

Something caught her eye in the tree root next to her. She looked closer. She jumped back in fright. The surface of the tree was not merely wooden bark, but it appeared to be the forms of myriads of humans fused into the bark, melted into the wood. They had become part of the wood themselves. They were frozen in agonized and painful positions. It was subtle, but she could see it. And it was like the entire tree was made out of these frozen statues of human pain.

It is not as cruel as it appears, Arisha.” “But all animals are the sacred creatures of Mother Earth,” she repeated back to him. His teaching flooded her memory. He had always stressed the holiness of animal life, even plants and insects. This seemed to be a violation of that sacred truth. “Yes, that is true. But some creatures are more sacred than others. Do you remember how we have talked about the nature of evil men?” “Yes.” She was realizing that not all of life was good and that some people wished to hurt others. “Well, many human beings are bad to Mother Earth. They cut down trees, kill and eat other animals and spoil the land. This is the price we must pay to appease the goddess Gaia. In a way it is really—justice.

spirits in the trees and plants. He explained that the earth with all its forests, lakes and rivers, and all the living things upon it was like one connected being and that being was the goddess. And it was man that ruined that harmony by raping Mother Earth. Man was like a plague on the earth that had to be cured, just like the plague that killed her uncle last year. He lay on his bed rotting away like a living corpse. It was a hideous memory, but it painted a picture she could understand. Humanity must be sacrificed for the benefit of the whole balance of life on Mother Earth. Gaia was well pleased.

The Hebrew word is actually Lilith, which the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible explains is a Mesopotamian demoness residing in a tree that reaches back to the third millennium BC.   Here we find Inanna (Ishtar) who plants a tree later hoping to cut from its wood a throne and a bed for herself. But as the tree grows, a snake makes its nest at its roots, Anzu settled in the top and in the trunk the demon ki-sikil-líl-lá [Lilith] makes her lair.[15]

she shows up in this Biblical context connected with the satyrs and Azazel. The very next verse (Isa. 34:15) talks about the owl that nests and lays and hatches her young in its shadow. But lexicons such as the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament and Brown, Driver, Briggs Hebrew Lexicon contest this Hebrew word for owl (qippoz) with more ancient interpretations of an “arrow snake.”[17] If they are correct, then the poetry of the passage would be more complete as the NASB indicates.   Isaiah 34:14–15 (NASB95) 14 Yes, the night monster (Lilith) will settle there And will find herself a resting place. 15 The tree snake (qippoz) will make its nest and lay eggs there, And it will hatch and gather them under its protection.

Arisha noticed that all the greenery and trees were dying the more they walked on. They finally arrived at a large clearing of a hidden valley. But it was desert like, bounded by the foothills of the mountains on one side and the dry rocky bluffs on the other. It seemed strange to Arisha. It seemed like a little pocket of dry desert death in the midst of an otherwise lively area. She stopped, stunned by the sight before her.

Moses was weary from his speech. He was weary with life and with age. He was one hundred and twenty-years old. His eyes had not dimmed and his physical vigor had not abated. But his soul was weighed down with resignation. He had been the instrument of Yahweh’s deliverance out of Egypt. He had shepherded an ungrateful people in the desert for forty years; he saw great and mighty signs and wonders. Yet he too was mortal. He too failed to uphold Yahweh as holy when he rebelled at the waters of Meribah. And for his disobedience, he would never enter the Promised Land. To have come so far and through so much and yet not receive the reward had broken Moses’ heart. He only found consolation in the fact that Yahweh was the great “I Am,” the god of the living, not the dead. So Moses knew that he was one small but important part of Yahweh’s plan to one day bless all the nations through the Seed of Abraham. Moses was but the planting of that seed that would ultimately blossom and grow into a tree that would fill all the earth with its glory.

walked around the circumference of the tree. Arisha looked up at the gargantuan timber that towered before them. She couldn’t see the top of the tree. But she heard the sound of a large bird somewhere high above in the branches. But the closer sounds of beasts brought her back down to earth as she saw before them, pens of animals all around: sheep, donkeys, pigs, goats, deer. Dozens of different animals were braying, baaing, and grunting. She stepped back in fright. She saw dozens of people lined up at the pens waiting their turns. Inside the pens were naked humans rubbing against the animals just like the ones with the tree and just like her parents did at night.

JOSHUA TREE   Reserve your judgment And drop the stones What our media spews Is so overblown Flesh of a man Stitched together with pain The way they crucify him Is a goddamned shame   Fading the work To erode his art For the sake of the game With a wicked heart It's an ancient story And a modern day curse Defaming the dead When they think it works   Convinced ya know What the root cause was In this complicated life Hell..no one does Screaming in the mirror With your head in the sand Don't pretend for a minute You understand   Dream your dreams And chase old ghosts Stand for the things You love the most Defend the truth As you know it to be And share your words With the Joshua tree

Saaremaa Crater Field KAALI, SAAREMAA Opinions vary on when it happened, but at some point between 5600 BCE and 600 BCE, a large meteor entered the atmosphere, broke into pieces, and slammed into the forest floor of the island of Saaremaa. The heat of the impact instantly incinerated trees within a 3-mile radius (5 km). A mythology developed

All right then,” Joshua said, “destroy the idols among you, and turn your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel.” The people said to Joshua, “We will serve God. We will obey him alone.” So, Joshua made a covenant with the people that day at Shechem, committing them to follow the decrees and regulations of the Lord. Joshua recorded these things in the scrolls of God’s instructions to the Israelites. As a reminder of their agreement, he took a huge stone and rolled it beneath a tree beside the Tabernacle of the Lord.

Another aspect of our multidimensional selves and communication is with the Earth and Earth energies. We each have a unique relationship with the Earth Mother whose planet we live on. We each communicate multidimensionally with nature. We communicate subtly and sometimes not so subtly with nature spirits, the Devas or Angels of plants, with tree spirits and the elementals. The elementals I speak of here are the Gnomes, Sylphs, Salamanders, and Undines. We also have the ability to communicate directly with the four elements: fire, air, earth, and water. This is how high level initiates and Masters have been able to control the weather. Every aspect of nature, in truth, contains a spiritual essence or being that embodies that particular form. We also have the ability to multidimensionally communicate with crystals and gemstones, and the elemental beings that create the form and physical substance itself. We also each can communicate multidimensionally with animals. There are many on this plane that can talk to animals and they will telepathically talk back in words and images. Many of us have multidimensional communication with pets that have passed over to the other side and are functioning as spirit guides and helpers. There are also spirit animals such as the eagle, jaguar, owl, bear, lion, and tiger, which come as guides and helpers as well on a physical and/or etheric level.

The Haunt The haunt walks counting the bodies held in cubicle chambers; each night the rattle of his keys reminds one of the living dead who are keyless. The Turnkey continues his nightly watch to ensure none of the living dead commits suicide. To be truly dead is forbidden, unless the State sanctions the kill. This ritual first began as a means of penitence, and Auburn was the first N.Y.S. penitentiary and silence was the means to repentance, silence and reading the bible. Back then, the penitent memorized the portions of the bible: when Cain killed Abel, Joshua’s war on Jericho, and all about Ruth, Mary, and Esther — with little thought of God. Over 100 years, the haunt walks with the sanctimonious sentiments of a sentinel, with self-righteous indignation which the living dead attempt to repel with false braggadocio — but when the lights go out, the sudden screams, and all- night talk to prohibit nightmares — awaiting the dawn — permit the haunt to smile with arrogant knowing. The torture of the night is the haunt’s pleasure, making the rounds smelling the decay of dreams deferred, the putrid stench of justice, like the full bowels of slave ships. Gun towers stand reminiscent of the hanging trees with its strange fruit that the haunt picks at leisure appraising its ripeness in terms of life sentences. As steel bangs against steel, chains clang with the echoes of gangs dressed in strips of day and night, black and white; the fright prohibits flight as jail cells constrict and severely depict the absence of liberty. The haunt of Auburn, year by year decade by decade, in a century has never escaped the nightly count of tormented souls, himself chained to the ball of the imprisoned — a spirit’s horror of lost freedom.

According to Icelandic folklore, thousands of elves, fairies, dwarves, and gnomes—collectively known as “hidden people”—live in rocks and trees throughout the country. It is no wonder, then, that the world’s only elf school is located in Reykjavík.

Curiosity had served as her axe and everything foreign was a tree.

Over in Joshua Tree and Yucca, the bars are filled with Los Angeles refugees—arty and fashionable in their misguided vision of what desert living is like. Vintage cowboy boots, gauzy dresses, floppy hats. Everyone pretending that there is some relationship between their costume and the landscape.

The mind's preoccupation with things of space affects, to this day, all activities of man. Even religions are frequently dominated by the notion that the deity resides in space, within particular localities like mountains, forests, trees or stones, which are, therefore, singled out as holy places; the deity is bound to a particular land; (...), and the primary question is: Where is the god? There is much enthusiasm for the idea that God is present in the universe, but that idea is taken to mean His presence in space rather than in time, in nature rather than in history; as if He were a thing, not a spirit. (...) While the deities of other peoples were associated with places or things, the God of Israel was the God of events: the Redeemer from slavery, the Revealer of the Torah, manifesting Himself in events of history rather than in things or places.

The first seven years of the Joshua tree’s life, it’s just a vertical stem. No branches,” she told me while we were hiking. “It takes years before it blooms. And every branching stem stops growing after it blossoms, so you’ve got this complex system of dead areas and new growth.

She was reluctant to admit that Buckeye had become what her sons called “a hick town.” The Sears and Roebuck no longer delivered, there were no new shiny, neon shopping malls, and the peach farmers, whose abounding yields had once been the town’s glory, had either moved or were slowly dying off. The few shopkeepers who eked out a living now catered to tourists who came in late Friday afternoons on their way to the emerging gambling oasis in Laughlin, Nevada. Indian mocassins and peach jam in jars with fake old-fashioned labels were loaded into their foreign cars before they sped through the invisible town to the highway lined with crooked Joshua trees.

The first seven years of the Joshua tree’s life, it’s just a vertical stem. No branches,” she told me while we were hiking. “It takes years before it blooms. And every branching stem stops growing after it blossoms, so you’ve got this complex system of dead areas and new growth.” I used to think about that, sometimes, when I wondered what parts of her might still be alive.

The Lord had tested them to see if they would follow His commandments with single-minded determination. As long as Joshua, then Caleb, then Othniel lived, they had obeyed. But eventually, the people had grown tired of fighting and had given up trying to wipe the land clean. So what if a few enemies survived in caves and crags? God’s people had tried, hadn’t they? Surely God couldn’t expect more of them than that. It was too much work to hunt the stragglers down and finish them off. What harm to leave them alone? It was time to enjoy the crops, the flocks and herds, the fruit trees ready for harvest. It was time to savor the milk and honey!

I was living in Joshua Tree, on the edge of a national park, with someone who barely tolerated me but more than anyone else, and I could no longer tell myself I was not a writer because I did not have the time. I was not a writer because I no longer enjoyed my own thoughts. I could not write my way to calm.

Joshua trees, he said. This is the only place in the world they live. And they live hundreds of years. The Mormons called them that. They drove out in their wagons to California and suddenly saw all of these and said they looked like Joshua, his arms up, welcoming them to the Promised Land.

Joshua trees looked like people,

Joshua trees don’t grow anywhere else in the whole world, sweet little bird,” her grandmother had told her. She always added the sweet when she called her little bird. “That’s how special they are. You should never climb on one or pull their branches. You can sit in their shade, but don’t hurt them. They only grow a fraction of an inch a year, so they’re very old and very wise. And the only way more Joshua trees can grow is with the help of the yucca moth.

Joshua trees love books,” her grandmother said. “And they love to be read to.

It wasn’t just any tree. It was an ancient Joshua tree. It stood in a crease of land where the desert ended and the mountain began, forming a wind tunnel. From the time the Joshua tree was a tiny sapling, it had been so beaten down by the whipping wind that, rather than trying to grow skyward, it had grown in the direction that the wind pushed it. It existed now in a permanent state of windblownness, leaning over so far that it seemed ready to topple, although, in fact, its roots held it firmly in place.

shadowy silhouettes between the even more shadowy silhouettes of the trees.

The route led through the enchanted chaos of the Arizona deserts, a country mostly of naked rock in mesas, peaks, and gashed canyons, painted tremendous colors with brushes of comet’s hair. Frequently it was a giant-cactus country — saguaro by designers of modern decoration, cholla by medieval torturers — or a country of yuccas and the yucca’s weirdest form, the Joshua tree. Sometimes it was even a grass country. And through most of the route it was a country where occasionally you could find the characteristic oasis of the Southwest, a little, hidden arroyo with something of a stream in it, choked with cottonwoods, green plants blooming only a rifle shot from desolation.

The oldest tune in our world sounds by one deep smile.

it’s like the man said: ‘the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago and the second best time is right now.

The captured King of Ai was brought handcuffed before Joshua. Joshua taking his cue from God drove a spear through the king and hung his body from a tree until evening. “At sunset, Joshua ordered them to take down his body from the tree and throw it down at the entrance of the city gate. And they raised a large pile of rocks over it, which remains to this day.” (Joshua 8:29 NIV)

Joshua Tree was named by Mormon pioneers- The arms looked like Joshua beckoning them to the promised land.

While we were in Midland, Mom painted dozens of variations and studies of the Joshua tree...I wanted to dig it up and replant it neat our house...Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.