Since arriving to the Pacific coast two years ago, I have made transient settlements in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area and now call the shores of Washington home. In this time I have had the pleasure to experience the great redwood forests of California and the fragrant evergreens of the Pacific Northwest. I have walked beneath shaded canopies on paths of red dirt and tracks of dank needles that wind across rugged coastlines and mountain ranges. I have found that there is a peace that comes from time spent among the trees. There is a comfort in their reassuring trunks, a luxuriousness in their moss-draped limbs, an exuberance in their snow frosted crowns.
Many who have come before me have felt the pull of the woods’ quiet power, been captivated by their fey enchantments, and have recorded their praises in journals, poems, and commandments. In this post, I’d like to share a selection of pictures I’ve taken while among the company of trees, alongside words from well-known naturalist-writers and environmental philosophers as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau. And as I am currently reading Richard Powers’ homage to the natural world, The Overstory, I have to throw in some passages from there as well. Because inspirational coffee mug quotes are always crowd pleasers…
“The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.”
Richard Powers – the overstory
“But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves.”
john muir – My First Summer in the Sierra
“I had nothing to do but look and listen and join the trees in their hymns and prayers.”
john muir – travels in alaska
“The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.”
john muir – John of the Mountains
“The trees indeed have hearts.”
Henry David Thoreau – Journal, December 20, 1851
“At night I dream that you and I are two plants that grew together, roots entwined, and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth, since we are made of earth and rain.”
Pablo Neruda – Regalo de un Poeta
“Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.”
Richard Powers – the overstory
“At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.”
Albert Camus – The stranger
“Lonely trees are not lonely; they have their eternal companies: Songs of the birds; shadows of the clouds; lights of the Moon; whispers of the winds…”
Mehmet Murat Ildan
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”
John Lubbock – The Use Of Life
I hear the wind among the trees. Playing celestial symphonies; I see the branches downward bent, Like keys of some great instrument.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – A Day of Sunshine
“Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.”
Albert Schweitzer
Condor sails the fog-borne tastes and smells the sea-band life. . . Airs breathed light and sheened a fog bourne drift of silver. Brushing antlered pine and feathered hemlock, fibered cypress shag; Deciphering cryptic sawyeries, trunks jig-mosaiced the sycamore planes: Jump free the missiled propellors my head: squadrons downtwirl the wind.
james joyce – Striding the Bones of the Coastal Range
“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
john muir – John of the Mountains
“As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.”
Richard Powers – the overstory
“A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.”
Richard Powers – the overstory
“I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them.”
James Russell Lowell
“Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.”
John muir
“Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”
Henry David Thoreau – On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”
John Muir – The Yosemite
