Some of my best friends have been trees. <3Tree Wisdom | Tania Marie's Blog
Originally posted on Tania Marie's Blog:
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Magickal Tree in High Park, Toronto I found on my visit there in 2013
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere
them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more
I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits
who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men,
like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world
rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves
there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing
only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up
their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is
more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down
and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole
history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of
its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the
sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the
narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms
endured. And every young farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood
has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing
danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries.Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever
knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach
learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the
ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life
from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took
with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the
smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark.
I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers,
I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me.
I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else.
I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I
live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree
has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy,
life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you,
and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads
away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back
again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you,
or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind
at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals
its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering,
though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of
the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads
homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own
childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful,
just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long
as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees,
then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our
thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen
to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except
what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
~Hermann Hesse, Baume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte (Trees. Reflections and Poems)
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