“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.”
Baume, Betrachtungen und Gedichte by Herman Hesse
***
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