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.
Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte