Tread Gently is a compendium of poems which invites you to take a closer look at yourself and examine the impact that you are having on the world around you. Why? Because 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: "To find and know yourself, look all around you in the world. To find and know the world, look into all the depths within yourself." (Rudolf Steiner, Harmony of the Creative Word) 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 on-going 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.