Quotes about Trees

A Murmur in the Trees - to note -
Not loud enough - for Wind -
A Star - not far enough to seek -
Nor near enough - to find -

I fear I have not one good word to say this fair morning, though the sun shines so encouragingly on the distant hills and gentle river and the trees are in their festive hues.  I am not festive, though contented.  When obliged to give myself to the prose of life, as I am on this occasion of being established in a new home I like to do the thing, wholly and quite, - to weave my web for the day solely from the grey yarn.

With the passage of days in this godly isolation [desert], my heart grew calm.  It seemed to fill with answers. I did not ask questions any more; I was certain.  Everything - where we came from, where we are going, what our purpose is on earth - struck me as extremely sure and simple in this God-trodden isolation.  Little by little my blood took on the godly rhythm.  Matins, Divine Liturgy, vespers, psalmodies, the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening, the constellations suspended like chandeliers each night over the monastery: all came and went, came and went in obedience to eternal laws, and drew the blood of man into the same placid rhythm.  I saw the world as a tree, a gigantic poplar, and myself as a green leaf clinging to a branch with my slender stalk.  When God's wind blew, I hopped and danced, together with the entire tree.

May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years.

May you wake up... and start dancing while you're still half-asleep.

May you spray-paint Rilke poems as graffiti on highway overpasses...

My you learn to identify by name 20 flowers, 15 trees, 10 clouds, and one extrasolar planet...

May you dream of taking a trip to the moon in a gondola powered by firecrackers and wild swans.

"Boise Cascade," said the other Republican husband.
"Sierra Club," said his Democrat wife.
'Wait, wait," I said. "So one of you fights for trees and the other fights against trees?"
"No, no," he said. "We make the paper she writes on to file lawsuits against the paper we make."

If a seperate personal Paradise exists for each of us mine must irreparably be planted with trees of words which the wind silvers like poplars, by people who see their confiscated justice given back, and by birds that even in the midst of the truth of death insist on singing in Greek and saying, eros, eros, eros.

What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.

The great forest, absolutely silent, save for the music of the brook, the smell of the woods, the charm of the campfire, the fragrance of the bed of boughs, all work a peace in the mind which has been accustomed for so many months to the noise and rush of the great city, the jolting of the railway train, and the smoke and dust of the locomotive.

The trees and plants show respect for each other by the way they live in harmony.  This also applies to the animal kingdom.

The mountains, rivers, grasses, trees, and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth.

Life is but a day; a fragile dew-drop on its perilous way from a tree's summit.

This place of mine
never is entered by humans
come for conversation,
only by the mute moon's light shafts
that slip in between the trees.

Should at that moment the full moon
Step forth upon the hill,
And memories hard to bear at noon,
By moonlight harder still,
Form in the shadows of the trees,---
Things that you could not spare
And live, or so you thought, yet these
All gone, and you still there,
A man no longer what he was,
Not yet the thing he planned...

Experimenting...
I hung the moon on various
branches of the pine.

No kind action ever stops with itself.  One kind action leads to another.  Good example is followed.  A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees.  The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves.

The woods were made for the hunters of dreams,
   The brooks for the fisher of song;
To the hunters who hunt for the gunless game
   The streams and the woods belong.
There are thoughts that moan from the soul of the pine
   And thoughts in a flower-bell curled;
And the thoughts that are blown with the scent of the fern
   Are as new and as old as the world.

"We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men... trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense.
They make journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true;but our own little comings and goings are only little more than tree-wavings- many of them not so much."

~John Muir~

i thank You God for most this amazing
day; for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods.  But he cannot save them from fools.

All around us we see the bridges of life collapsing, those capillaries which create all organic life. This dreadful disintegration has been caused by the mindness and mechanical work of man, who has wrenched the living soul from the Earth's blood - water.
The more the engineer endeavours to channel water, of whose spirit and nature he is today still ignorant, by the shortest and straightest route to the sea, the more the flow of water weighs into the bends, the longer its path and the worse the water will become. The spreading of the most terrible disease of all, of cancer, is the necessary consequence of such unnatural regulatory works. These mistaken activities - our work - must legitimately lead to increasingly widespread unemployment, because our present methods of working, which have a purely mechanical basis, are already destroying not only all of wise Nature's formative processes, but first and foremost the growth of the vegetation itself, which is being destroyed even as it grows. The drying up of mountain springs, the change in the whole pattern of motion of the groundwater, and the disturbance in the blood circulation of the organism - Earth - is the direct result of modern forestry practices. The pulsebeat of the Earth was factually arrested by the modern timber production industry. Every economic death of a people is always preceded by the death of its forests. The forest is the habitat of water and as such the habitat of life processes too, whose quality declines as the organic development of the forest is disturbed. Ultimately, due to a law which functions with awesome constancy, it will slowly but surely come around to our turn. Our accustomed way of thinking in many ways, and perhaps even without exception, is opposed to the true workings of Nature. Our work is the embodiment of our will. The spiritual manifestation of this work is its effect. When such work is carried out correctly, it brings happiness, but when carried out incorrectly, it assuredly brings misery.

With all due respect for the wondrous ways people have invented to amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find that this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant's way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.

The seeds that we speed into life to be trees, will soon become fallen if thier roots aren't deep.

God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.

The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and wood, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

This is not anthropomorphizing.  From a dryad's point of view, attributing consciousness to human being is DEIMORPHIZING.  Nonetheless it is evident from patient observation that human beings do behave in a purposive and loosely "organized" fashion - albeit not so organized or purposive as , say, a colony of termites.  Let alone a healthy forest.  So humans CAN be said to possess awareness of a certain, limited kind.

At the timberline where the storms strike with the most fury, the sturdiest trees are found.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Give me a land of boughs in leaf,
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen there is grief;
I love no leafless land.