A Fruitful Life

By Joseph F Hoyt

There is a natural path to a life of abundance.

Through the examples of the trees, and the birds, and the seeds, nature guides us. By following her examples, we can learn to:

Find your truest self in silence.

Fill your internal void with the gifts planted inside of you, rather than with the external and materialistic.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph F. Hoyt
• Release date: Jul 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737464112

Book preview

A Fruitful Life

Nature’s Principles for Finding and Living Your Life’s Purpose

by Joseph Hoyt

A Fruitful Life

Nature’s Principles for Finding and Living Your Life’s Purpose

Joseph Hoyt

Copyright © 2021 Joseph Hoyt

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

ISBN: 978-1-7374641-1-2

Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.

Book design by Designer.

Printed by Joseph Hoyt, in the United States of America.

First printing edition 2021.

www.JosephHoyt.com

Dedication:

To all those who know trees by the sound of their voice.

About A Fruitful Life

by R. J. Banks,

Author of: The Power of I Am and the Law of Attraction

The fruitful and purposeful life you desire is yours. In this book, by using nature as an example, you will learn how to discover, nurture and harvest your divinely placed seeds of greatness. These seeds are deep within your heart and soul. Just as the forest is filled with an abundance of life, nature evolves and advances on a precise schedule and cycle. This cycle and growth is dependent on the spreading and cultivating of seeds. By using nature as an example, this book easily lays out how one can develop a pattern of success and happiness in one's own life. I highly recommend this book to anyone desiring to elevate their understanding, fulfilling, sharing, and living in gratitude for a fruitful life. ~ Rob Banks

A Fruitful Life

A Fruitful Life shows us a path to a more fulfilling life and a path toward purpose. By following nature’s principles, we see through the empty promise of materialism and find meaning and direction in our lives. This book shows us how to let the trees, and the birds, and the seeds guide us. In these pages, we learn to connect with the deepest part of ourselves in silence and solitude.

Joseph Hoyt is an author of nonfiction books as well as a newspaper columnist. He has spent decades roaming through woods and meadows learning from what he has seen and writing about his experiences. When not outdoors, Joseph is usually reading books on self-improvement. He and his wife, Karen, live and work from their cabin in rural Oklahoma.

www.JosephHoyt.com

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter One: A Trip Around the Sun

Chapter Two: A Festival of Change

Chapter Three: The Song In Our Heart

Chapter Four: A Benevolent Universe

Chapter Five: You Must Plant

Chapter Six: The Love of Silence

Chapter Seven: Not-Enoughness

Chapter Eight: Of Seeds and Weeds

Chapter Nine: Intuition

Chapter Ten: Grow with Intention

Chapter Eleven: If You Want to Fly, Be Willing to Jump

Chapter Twelve: To Get What You Want, Give From Your Heart

Chapter Thirteen: A Day

Chapter Fourteen: Don’t Eat the Seeds

Chapter Fifteen: The Value of Pruning

Chapter Sixteen: A Fruitful Life

Chapter Seventeen: In a Nutshell

Chapter One

A Trip Around the Sun

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Imagine, if you will, that you are a bird. But not just any bird, you are a great bird, and you are on an epic, once in a lifetime, migration. This is what you and the other birds like you were born to do. This is why you are here. Since you were a fledging, you had always dreamed of this day, this time of soaring toward your purpose, this time of making a difference in this world.

Now, each morning, you rise with the sun, join your flock, and you fly, flapping your wings for all your worth heading toward the promised land. To your left and to your right, behind you and in front of you, above and below, the other birds are also flying, eyes forward, blindly believing in the process. Each day you all look for signs you are on the right path to your ultimate destination. Then, every evening, with the flying done, you reflect on your day’s journey, and you feel good about yourself, how you have logged another day of soaring toward the promised land.

You are not exactly sure who's leading the way or what it is supposed to look like when you get there, but since this is the direction all your feathered friends are heading, it must be right. Right? I mean, who are you to question the entire flock?

Though, that is exactly what has been happening in your life. You have started questioning everything. You have noticed that despite the endless days of flapping, you do not seem to be making progress. It seems the faster and longer you fly, the further you get from where you want to be. Lately, the wind has been in your face, and the going is getting tougher, and the harder you flap, the more you feel that you will never arrive. These last few years, you have noticed that some of your feathered friends have fallen from the sky. Lately, the promised land hasn't been looking as promising.

You summon the courage to ask a few of your feathered friends, Where are we going? We do not seem to be heading in the right direction. But they look at you as if you have lost your mind, so you make a vow that going forward, you will keep your thoughts to yourself.

Each day though, your doubts grow stronger. All the signs are wrong. To make matters worse, you have developed a nagging little voice deep inside urging you to turn back, and each day that voice grows stronger and more insistent. You push the voice down and plunge forward. The others in your flock seem content with the direction. Perhaps you should feel the same. You feel a little ridiculous.

Perched alone one dark night, after an especially grueling day of flying, you are jolted from your fitful sleep as the nagging voice isn't so little anymore. In fact, it is practically yelling at you, demanding answers. Who are we following and why? What is the purpose of all of this? Tell me why I should not believe that we are lost?

To your frustration, you do not have answers to the questions your internal voice is asking, and you have no idea what to do next. Should you continue to blindly follow the flock, hoping that all of them know where they are going and what to do once we all arrive? Something in your gullet tells you that is not the right thing to do. Do you turn back? That does not feel right either. Maybe you head out on your own. If you do, though, trusting on a wing and a prayer, what direction do you take? You feel cheated and double-crossed. You feel vulnerable. You realize that you are out on a limb. What's an avian purpose seeker to do now? you ask yourself.

The story of our feathered adventurer is all too familiar to many of us, including myself. I, too, have flown with the flock chasing my purpose, only one day to look up and realize that I have no idea where I am going or why I am going there. If you can relate, then we may be birds of a feather.

I believe we are lost. Not the kind of lost where you simply stop and ask for directions or the kind where you can put an address in your phone and follow the screen. We are the kind of lost where we not only do not know where we are—we do not know where we are going, or who we are following. To make matters worse, I do not even think most of us realize that we are lost.

At least I know this has been true for me. I woke up one night wondering where I was going, who I was following, and why I was following them. I had no idea what I hoped to find when I finally arrived. I began asking myself questions like; Am I truly happy? Am I living a purpose-filled life? Do I believe in where society is leading us? To each of my questions, the answer was a resounding no! When I began looking around, it was obvious to me that many, maybe even most, of the people I knew felt the same way. When I would ask others where they were going in life and what they hoped to accomplish, they could not find an answer, or they looked at me as if I'd lost my mind.

What should I do? I asked myself. The first step was clear. What do you do when you are lost? You stop. Before you take another step, before you spend another day going in the wrong direction, you stop and get your bearings. Then you try to find where you are relative to where you are trying to end up. Like a map in a shopping mall, you first look for the big red You are here dot, so you can navigate toward your direction. Once you stop and then determine where you are, then you can begin making plans to get to where you want to go.

So that is what I did. Going into my third trimester of life, I stopped and began getting my bearings. I bought a little cabin in the woods, and I decided to spend a year, one trip around the sun, being with nature. Each day I spent time in the outdoors, listening, watching, and applying the lessons.

Why nature? The last time I felt that I knew where I was going, the last time I could remember knowing that I had a purpose, I was a child. Back then, my dreams were still alive and well. I would jump from bed each morning and run with open arms toward my day. Special was not out there waiting for me. It was inside of me, bursting to get out and see the light of day. Back then, I believed that my time on this planet would make a difference. Back then, I spent most of my time with nature.

At one time, mankind was close to nature, and we listened to her advice in finding our direction. Back then, we could still hear the inner voices inside us. We are of this world, after all, and the same forces that opens the flowers and directs the birds and urges the caterpillar into the chrysalis is there for us.

We all have an internal voice, a compass that guides us to where we are born to go. There has to be more than this has been my mantra, but as I spent more time with nature, I began seeing universal principles—truths that applied to all living creatures. I watched the comings and goings of the natural world. I listened for lessons; I began applying them to my life. I found inspiration from the trees, and the birds, and the insects. After all, we are of this world, so the same principles that govern the trees and lead the birds should apply to us, right?

The results have been amazing. I have learned to distinguish my inner voice—my true voice that guides me—from the sometimes-overwhelming cacophony of other voices inside me. I have learned that I have a purpose, and I achieve that purpose not by following others but by finding my own way. As I follow nature's directions,