TREES
By : Ruth Te-es Kim Virgo
“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 fulfil 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. 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.”
©Siamsinna leh Vakiangbu
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