Listening to Trees

“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." - Hermann Hesse
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Fred Steeves
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Re: Listening to Trees

Post by Fred Steeves »

Was that you in the picture Christine?
The unexamined life is not worth living.

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Christine
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Re: Listening to Trees

Post by Christine »

Fred Steeves wrote:Was that you in the picture Christine?
Yes it is me Fred, on the Danube in Romania just as we entered the Delta. What a night that was and this tree I am sitting with spoke so loudly of things of the past.
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Re: Listening to Trees

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Your picture with that tree is indeed a special moment in time captured for all who ever care to see Christine. I did wonder how our local professor came across that picture, but in going to the way way back machine, saw it was possible he got that from the blog you posted of your's and Cristian's Danube trip, but was never posted here on the forum thread.

As a kid "stuck" in a wilderness camp for troubled youths back in the early 80's for a year, I was fortunate enough to take the entire Suwanee River to it's delta into the Gulf of Mexico on a 28 day canoe trip with about 10 other kids and two counselors. No memorable pics with a tree speaking loudly of the past however, that would have to wait until decades later and remain undocumented.
The unexamined life is not worth living.

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Re: Listening to Trees

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I like you Fred...I feel your awesomeness...but some times...Dios mio ...I think you are not the sharpest tool in the shed :P
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Re: Listening to Trees

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Re: Listening to Trees

Post by Fred Steeves »

Professor Doom wrote:I like you Fred...I feel your awesomeness...but some times...Dios mio ...I think you are not the sharpest tool in the shed :P
Whatever dude...
The unexamined life is not worth living.

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Re: Listening to Trees

Post by Spiritwind »

Image

Tree of life in the center
Tree of life all around
Tree of life growing taller
Rooted in the ground

Tree of life after lifetime
Tree of life never dies
Tree of Earth Mother Spirit
Tree of Father Sky

(This song was written by a guy named Brian ? for the Svaha Spirit Lodge 1999 Long Dance event on Orcas Island which I attended - wanted to give credit as best I can)
I see your love shining out from my furry friends faces, when I look into their eyes. I see you in the flower’s smile, the rainbow, and the wind in the trees....
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Re: Listening to Trees

Post by Spiritwind »

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Borrowed from a friends FB post (thank you Thomas!) - and notice how the the tops of the trees gave each other space?

“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.”

~ Kahlil Gibran
I see your love shining out from my furry friends faces, when I look into their eyes. I see you in the flower’s smile, the rainbow, and the wind in the trees....
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Re: Listening to Trees

Post by Spiritwind »

Hermann Hesse on What Trees Teach Us About Belonging and Life

“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.” By Maria Popova

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/09/2 ... BXVM9YA8qU

I woke up this morning to discover a tiny birch tree rising amidst my city quasi-garden, having overcome unthinkable odds to float its seed over heaps of concrete and glass, and begin a life in a meager oasis of soil. And I thought, my god*, what a miracle. What magic. What a reminder that life does not await permission to be lived.

This little wonder reminded me of a beautiful passage by Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) — one of the most beautiful I’ve ever read — from his 1920 collection of fragments, Wandering: Notes and Sketches (public library).

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.
I see your love shining out from my furry friends faces, when I look into their eyes. I see you in the flower’s smile, the rainbow, and the wind in the trees....
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Re: Listening to Trees

Post by Christine »

In my visions I walk this path today and everyday, silently listening to the hush... let's walk together hearing the song that nature sings.

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The journey, the challenge is to step into the
projection room and stop being lost in the script.
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