Tread Gently is a selection of poems which all have at their heart the need for us to honour and respect our living planet Earth on which we live today. Inspired sometimes by feeling the heavy loss of life such as with disappearance of our rain forests, other times by experiencing the sheer elation of burgeoning life as witnessed in the growing flowers and passing clouds, they each subtly ask us to stop and stare and begin to re-connect with nature - the world in which we are so much a part and from which we have so sorely separated ourselves.

Tread Gently aims to nudge the reader back out into the outdoor, to look again - with new eyes - at the trees, the clouds and the insects, the flowers, the birds and the rivers and, instead of glancing unthinkingly at what is often considered too familiar to consider, to discover afresh each living and breathing element that moves in the world around us with greater meaning and significance in its own existence.

Tread Gently is our way of saying sorry to the Earth for the damage we have done and simultaneously saying thank you for continuing to sustain us, day after day, despite it all.

Preface

We believe that there are, broadly speaking, two ways of finding inner peace or reaching the inner you, the eternal self which contains all those aspects of you still waiting to emerge but which largely remain hidden:

There are those moments as the mind goes quiet, when a growing stillness envelops us, flooding us with a knowing warmth and calm, deepening our sense of peace and contentment. There are those moments when the imagination soars to reach the untouchable seemingly beyond the tangible senses. There are those moments which capture a magic, however fleeting, of something above and beyond every-day consciousness. And although they may be very different each time, these ethereal experiences are nonetheless very real and add to our individual evolution.

There are also those moments when, being still in Nature, a notion comes to us of sensing and understanding that Nature in all its intricacy holds something very special for us that is simultaneously refreshing, energising and inspiring. The value of re-connecting with Nature is hugely individualistic but essential for each one of us to re-discover in order to bring ourselves into peace and harmony, at one with ourselves and every other living being on planet Earth. It is said that Nature is an expression of the divine, the ongoing culmination of billions of years of evolution, just like ourselves who started as stardust as did the planet of which we are currently a part, and which should be revered and protected as such.

This compendium of poems is about finding inner peace or the inner you through both those two ways, namely inner exploration and outer re-connection with Nature. We have found our journeys both an exploration and a discovery, challenging and fun, eye-opening and reflective, made more so when we see how these now translate into the written word. Sometimes it has turned out to be not quite what we expected if, indeed, we had any expectations at all.

We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

I AM

All that God intended.