NOTE FOURTEEN – FOR TREES FROM TREES

Herman Hesse makes Argus think hard about some lessons living in trees.

I’ve been thinking how much a tree is me.
How much I’d like to be a tree – Not a lonely person but a great, solitary man.

There’s a lesson in their rustle. Stories of aeons tucked away and told every night. When I listen, I learn a whole history – the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks endured and the storms survived.

They live out their seed to the very end. And we know the noblest, hardest, most indestructible of them grow in the least ideal conditions.

There’s a lesson in their stillness. Because when we can’t bear it any longer, we look at one and it tells us simply: to stay still. That it isn’t easy or difficult. That home is within us. The miracle is in the living, in the breathing, in the deep thinking, in the routine, in the random, in the darkness, in the light, in being a restless child one minute and a poised adult in the next.

There’s a lesson in their springing. Some tiny, some big trunks filled with magic that are a reminder that life does not await permission to be lived.

There’s a lesson in the wind. To waver but never escape.
We only ever run from ourselves. Trees don’t. They stay, they stay and they show up by shooting up.

Suddenly, I don’t want to be a tree. I simply want to be me.
Such a swift shift tells me I surely am.

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