The Cherry Tree: Chapter 2

People judge people. People notice people. No matter what they say, people are always watching, caring. And no matter what we say, we know it and we care. Everyone has a mask. They may have out it on themselves, or others may have put it on them. We all have one, and it takes a great deal of courage to be able to take it off. We are like superheros in this. We are scared to take off our masks. Who we really are is a secret that we only let a few people know. We are sensitive creatures inside, and we are scared that if we trust others to let them see whats under our mask, they will criticize us. And so we keep our masks on, whether we like our mask or not.

Our society is harsh and judging. If you do not fit in, than we ridicule you and cast you out. For example, take women in our society. Our image of women is taken from the magazines and t.v. shows that we see. It is given to us from models pictured in stores, and the celebrities who we see as the ideal people of our society. Yet these people are not average. No, they are the few, yet ever woman strives to be like them, to have their perfect body, their perfect hair. Yet few are able to achieve these looks. So what happens to the rest of those women, who by some turn of fate or another were not given the material beauty these few women have? We cast them out, for we deem them unfit to be part of our accepted society. We place so much emphasis on our material looks, that we often forget the rest of what makes us beautiful. We forget the beauty of our minds and our hearts. The will wither and grow old with time, much like the blossoms of a cherry tree, and we focus so much on this one part, that we forget the fruit that grows sweet and lushes long after the flower has shriveled and decayed.

Our society seems as if it is based of that flower, and while its sweet sent and beauty do give comfort to our senses, we cannot survive on merely the flower. If you pick the flower to save it in your scrapbook, then it will never pollinate and produce the cherries to sate our hunger, nor will those cherries fall to earth to have their pits be reborn into yet more trees.

Those are the masks that we wear, those flowers, and as long as we wear them, we will never move on, never mature and ripen into the fruit, nor continue on after to be reborn again into a whole new organism. No, we forget the potential we have inside ourselves and wear our masks for fear that we, like those flowers, will shrivel and die. We forget that material beauty is fleeting, while the beauty of the heart and the soul will endure forever.