“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 leads you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

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.”

– Herman Hesse

I believe that trees have souls, and I believe the photo above captures the soul of our very old and beautiful apple tree.

Chris Maser, an author, and tree scholar wrote in his book Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest, that what we are doing to the trees and forests of the world is a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.

In the country, living in nature, and among our partners, the animals, I have come to see this very clear connection between the angry and disconnected between the natural world and our own well being.

As we devour our world, we cannibalize ourselves and our children.

In our twisted world of civics and news, we have forgotten that nature and we are not different things, we are one thing, and what happens to one, happens to the other.

The collapse of our environment mirrors our own spiritual confusion. We sacrifice our very world for a few more years of profit;  we are disconnected from the natural world, we are disconnected from one another.

I wonder of human beings can muster the will and the wisdom to save their own world. I don’t have the answer, I doubt I will live to find out. It seems much too big an argument for me to know how to make: we will either save ourselves or we won’t. I guess that’s Radical Acceptance write large.

When I think of Maria, and of me, I dream that we are two plants, growing together, our roots entwined with one another, both of us – all of us – made of earth and rain.

Franklin Roosevelt said that a nation that destroys its soils destroys itself:  “Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.”