What do trees and poems have in common? What do they teach us? How can we listen to them? Here are some enlightening reflections from Hermann Hesse’s Wandering and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature.
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 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 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 farm boy 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… 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.
Seeing a tree and listening to a tree means at the same time being seen and listened to by a tree that teaches us to recognize the radical intimacy hiding the unitary meaning of life and revealing who we are. The eyes of the tree and the eyes of the poet –Emerson adds– meet and reflect each other in comprehending and integrating all the parts of the landscape including ourselves.
When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet.
The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape.
There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.
in our time, with the emergence of Ecocriticism and Environmental studies, there is a tendency to define the poetics of trees by emphasizing the interdisciplinary perspective from which to observe and contemplate trees. Tiziano Fratus coined the term dendrosophy: s.f. (from the Greek δένδρον, “tree,” and σοφία, “knowledge, awareness, love”). He defines dendrosophy as a field that unites different typologies of knowledge about history, biology, botany, forest studies anthropology, literature, etc. as they relate to trees and woods.” Moreover, Fratus’ imaginative etymology suggests that the person who practices dentrosophy is called a dendrosopher, from σοφός, ‘sage’, and that dendrosophy may also indicate “a practice of meditation that calls for immersion in a natural environment, such as nature preserves, mountain landscapes, ancient forests, deserts, in order to nurture inner peace” (“Walking Roots”, 238).
Bibliography
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Bode, Carl, and Cowley, Malcolm. The Portable Emerson. Rev. ed. New York: Viking, 1981. Print. Viking Portable Library.
Tiziano Fratus, “Walking Roots: Weaving Past and Future through Italy’s Woods” in Italy and the Environmental Humanities : Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies. Eds. Serenella Iovino, Enrico Cesaretti and ElenaPast. Charlottesville: U of Virginia, 2018. Print. Under the Sign of Nature. 235-241.
Hesse, Hermann. Wandering: Notes and Sketches. London: Triad Paladin Grafton, 1988. Print.