Fairy Tale Trees

by Folke Tegetthoff, translated by Milton Grimes

God sat in his heavenly laboratory and was working intensively on his favorite project, “Earth.” Water had already been created, as well as the sun and the moon. There was also a lot of green stuff and even a few animals were trampling about the area. In addition to the really serious things, the dear lord also found times for some little games, which he didn’t take very seriously at all.

“If I wanted to see myself down there,” he thought in his eternal modesty, “what would I have to create?” Goodness, honesty, generosity, love, and much more occurred to him. “But I can’t simply have these things rained down to earth,” he mumbled to himself, and since he just happened to be forming a colorful ball of clay, he had an idea. For each of his characteristics he would create a fruit and for each its own tree.

And so, there was on earth a tree of goodness, one of generosity, of humility, a tree of love and one of truth - oh yes, there were soon many more trees, which God had created in his eternal modesty… But from the very beginning there was a principle in the heavenly laboratory, that everything in creation must also have its counterpart. “Confounded,” the old master thought to himself, “I was a little careless and too much in a hurry.” He had no choice but to also create a tree of envy and jealousy, a tree of hate and of lies, a tree of egoism and one of meanness, a tree…

“Good heavens,” he complained, “will it never end, am I really so good that I also have to plant so much badness on earth?!”

A little angered at such a stupid mistake, which always happens when you fool around in the middle of serious work, God looked at his plan, on which the creation of mankind was next on the list. “That too,” he complained, and went to work.

His mood improved drastically, however, because the results were really nice to look at. They had become quite attractive, these humans.

“Listen well, you humans,” spoke God very seriously to the little creatures, “There are many fruit trees where I have just put you. I actually made a little mistake and you have to be very careful. Well then, you are permitted to eat the round-shaped fruit with the yellow dots, also the egg-shaped ones with red circles. Also elongated ones, which are violet, orange and green and hard ones with small protrusions. And also those, which… the list included 237 fruits, and ended with a small black fruit with tiny yellow spots all around the stem.

But under no circumstances are you permitted to eat the black fruit with the tiny orange colored dots around the stem, or those round-shaped ones with red circles. Also the egg-shaped ones with green dots, and never eat the fruit with… and there followed again 237 fruits, that had characteristics, which God had to create because of that dratted principle of duality.

So, these poor little humans were helplessly confused, even before they arrived in the huge world. And anybody can imagine what happened when they stood there in front of those 474 trees!

When God saw how his humans wandered aimlessly among the good and the bad fruit trees, in despair because they couldn’t differentiate between one and the other, he had no choice (mostly to contain the damage he had caused) but to direct them in God’s name to eat of all the fruits.

And he warned the humans for heaven sake, to pay attention to which fruits were sweet and which were bitter, and to eat regularly more of the sweet ones, and less frequently of the bitter ones. But even then God sensed, that it would never work…

Tales from Heaven, 2002, Nymphenburger Publishers