Trees Save Me, Daily

“When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.”

— Mary Oliver

S’ul-hween X’pey, Old Cedar Nature Preserve. Photo credit: Cliff LeSergent Images West Photography

I often go for walks through S’ul-hween X’pey, Old Cedar Nature Preserve. This reserve contains some of the last remaining old-growth forest on our island. A walk through Old Cedar offers a mystical experience. The exposed roots of the towering Douglas firs form a woven tapestry. Moss and lichen adorn the trees, and ferns grow at their feet. Saplings sprout from old tree stumps, connecting the past and the future. The oldest cedar on the island can be found in this nature preserve.

Old Cedar is a place of deep silence. Rarely do I meet anyone on my walks through this forest. I see the occasional bird flitting in the trees, but bird song is minimal. The only sound is the wind brushing against leaves. I always walk out of Old Cedar feeling grounded.

I love trees, but don’t ask me to identify a tree! Although I do know the names of my favourites. I always stop to stroke the satin softness revealed under the curling bark of the orange-red arbutus growing on outcrops by the ocean. I admire the twisted, gnarled branches of the Garry oaks leaning on windswept hills. I have a hummingbird feeder hanging in the dwarf red maple tree on my deck, a tree that offers a shady spot for reading. We hope to plant a white dogwood next year, the floral emblem of British Columbia, which can only be found here, in the southwestern corner of our province.

In a recent newsletter, Susan Cain shared that her all-purpose solution to any trouble, any loneliness, any lapse in appreciation of the world, is to go visit the trees. And, when she is full of joy, calm, and contentment - she visits the trees.

In this same newsletter, she writes that over the years, people have told her to read Herman Hesse on this topic, but she never got around to it until she came across this excerpt in the Marginalian. Cain wrote that this piece is so glorious that she urges all of us to read every precious word:

“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… 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.”