The Oak Tree

From my newsletter post, Where to Live.

An old tale: Once there grew a giant oak tree, so large that it took hours just to walk around it—from this you can imagine it’s enormous height and the spread of its branches. As the sun rose and set the oak would shade entire provinces, one after the other, and the strongest winds would hardly shake its smallest branches. With their fields in the shade, the peasants complained of poor harvests, so they asked the king to cut down the oak. The king obliged, sending one thousand men with axes, and once the tree was felled it provided firewood for five hundred years. The peasants have had good harvests ever since.

Now what could this story mean?

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