
Hermann Hesse (from Trees: Reflections and Poems):
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 farmboy 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. . . . 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.
Thanks to : http://eco-literacy.net/listening-to-the-trees/
پ.ن :البته نه اینکه تمام گفتههاش با لحظههای من سازگاره، اما این عظمت درخت... این زیباییهای درخت... اینکه اینقدر دوستداشتنی باشه و هست! نوشته رو برام خیلی دوستداشتنیتر می کنه.