Trees
An
excerpt from "Wanderings" by Herman Hesse
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 forces 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 it's 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 tress 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 labour 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.
© Herman Hesse.
From Wandering by Herman Hesse. Published by Picador. 1972.
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