Commie-Unity Acupuncture

Our 3 immediate neighbors on my parent’s street (1 to each side and 1 in front) were WWII vets. They were able to move into the neighborhood and were educated thanks to the GI bill. They were there when only their few houses existed to be surrounded by tracts of undeveloped land. Trees were planted back then that grew into beautiful old trees that I adored when we first moved into the neighborhood. I asked the vets once about the neighborhood; one of them said that he had spent his life after the war seeing the area around him being developed for residence and commercial purposes, and that he has spent his life watching those trees grow from saplings. In a series of wind gusts several years ago the tree in front of my folks’ house lost one of its larger limbs. It was still standing in the morning; its branch had almost crushed a car. Each of these vets came out to see what they could do about the broken limb. None of us had the tools to deal with a branch that large, so my folks called the city. We thought: simple branch removal. We were dead wrong. The city thought: potential threat and simply brought down this historical figure when everyone was out on a work/class day. When I got back, I was so surprised I teared up from anger and loss. It seemed those city assholes made no attempt to figure out any solution other than “cut it down.” To add greater injury, when the stump sprouted a single shoot that grew into a strong verdant bush over a few months, the city came back and made sure nothing more came out of that stump. A tree that at that point had lived for 5 decades and had demonstrated a strong will to survive was ended by a government that was not truly connected to the community it was supposed to serve. 2 of those neighbors have died in the years since then. Whenever the 3rd dies, I wonder if I will be the only one to realize the connection those 4 beings had. Just a story I remembered when I read the post below and the tag on the original photo.

kathleenjoy:

Beautiful words from Herman Hesse. See also a poem we wrote about trees.

jawsmusictheme:

“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.

Text © From Wandering by Herman Hesse. Published by Picador. 1972.

A fallen tree in the forest of Changa Manga outside Lahore. Photograph taken on 3rd November, 2011, at 12:24 pm.