The Return of the Trees

By Robert Ringer

Finally, the trees are back —my trees. The trees have once again shut off the outside world from my veranda. Almost makes me feel a modern-day Thoreau. Of course, he couldn’t see a golf course in the distance.

The global cooling of winter seems to have treated my trees well. They appear prepared for the global warming of summer. As far as I can tell, only a few branches have failed to resuscitate their leaves, so I’m happy to report that I lost very few friends over the winter.

It was early evening, and the trees were in one of their talkative moods. You are aware that trees talk to you, are you not? Trust me, they do … and sometimes they do so in a whisper.

Trees tease and tantalize. They call out to you. And when a soft breeze blows, they can be downright sensuous. When my trees return every spring, it’s like reigniting an old love affair.

It’s hard to imagine how anyone can look at a tree and believe that the universe is nothing more than one big cosmological “accident.” I believe that such a thought reflects cognitive dissonance — i.e., a conflict between what we want to believe (that we are not subject to a Higher Power) and what we know, or at least suspect, to be the truth.

I think it’s more than just a bit interesting that trees have played such an important role in human spiritual history — the Persian Tree of Immortality … the Bodhi Tree (or Tree of Awakening) that shaded Buddha for forty-nine days as he achieved enlightenment … the Hebrew Tree of Knowledge that proved to be the downfall of Adam and Eve (and mankind?).

German poet, novelist, and Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse, who died in 1962, said:

[Trees] are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. …

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. …

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. …

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.”

Would that I could have written that.

When I first wrote about my trees last July (see “The Melody of Life”), I described the wind whipping them into “a choreographed frenzy that brought with it a windy, rustling melody.” But the other night, the melody was produced by a gentle, cool breeze — soft and soothing instead of boisterous and exciting.

I thought about The History Channel’s series Life After People, and smiled. After all the wars have been fought, after all the governments have managed to enslave the human race, after all the technological progress has failed to solve the world’s problems or prove that there is no God, nature will have its way. As foreseen by Life After People, over time, the trees and their leafy relatives around the globe will swallow up every building, every bridge, every work of art … every trace of mankind.

And after a series of global warmings and global coolings, the earth will, like all other matter in the universe, end its life as a lonely ball of ice, spinning around a dying star. Then what? Perhaps, as some scientists have suggested, a quantum fluctuation will tear every atom in the universe apart, and everything — including the atoms of our own dusty remains — will reunite with the Conscious Universal Power Source.

But that’s another discussion for another time. Right now, there’s a tree not far from you. Take a good look at it — and be sure to listen carefully. Because if you listen, Hesse said, you will not want to be a tree. You will want only to be what you are.

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Liberty Education Interview Series

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