“To the person who wields a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
- Abraham Maslow, 20th century American psychologist and philosopher (1908–1970)
Hear the parable of the trees.
Inspired by the following Turkish proverb:
“The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.”
There once was a forest.
It was a magnificent forest, as forests go.
There were many like it throughout the verdant land.
It had taken many years to get to where it was.
Animals loved to inhabit this forest.
Squirrels scampered among its branches and trunks.
Birds of all kinds alit in its branches and built nests, some in the trunks, some in the branches.
Jays flitted about.
Woodpeckers pecked.
Parents preened the feathers of their young and pushed them out of the nest to find wing on their own.
Some birds even stored acorns in the bark of branches of certain trees, which they accessed when other food was scarce.
