Listening to the Trees

Redwood National Park

Green © 2013 Bo Mackison

“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

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Bo Mackison is photographer, book-artist, collector of stories, naturalist, curator and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. Today I wandered through my many notebooks and journals, in search  of quotes about trees.

Walking in the Redwoods – An Experience of Awe

Looking Up

Looking Up ©2013 Bo Mackison

“Going to the woods is going home.” ~ John Muir

The magnificent redwoods have been on my bucket list for years, circled in bright red ink, one of those must-see wonders. So when my daughter proposed an add-on vacation to her work trip in northern California, and asked if I wanted to join her, the answer was a no hesitation, emphatic “YES!”

My kids are National Park junkies. Sherpa and I guided sojourns through the United States on an annual basis – two or three weeks on the road in August every year from the time our youngest was 5 and able to enjoy long roads trips. We even managed a few trips with college aged kids, though less regular, so our family has memories of many travels through the 48 contiguous states. There are parts of the country we didn’t travel through, not because of interest, but because we ran out of parents-with-children vacation years.

We never traveled the Everglades in Florida, most of the gulf coast of Florida, Upper Michigan; we only did brief forays into Delaware, Connecticut, Oregon and Nevada. And, though we flew to Sacramento for a family wedding many years ago, we couldn’t add vacation time, and so we never explored the National Parks in northern California or southern Oregon.

Through a Redwood

Looking Through ©2013 Bo Mackison

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” ~ John Muir

When the opportunity to explore Redwood National Park came, we didn’t hesitate. We went.

We sat on the beaches, watching the waves of the Pacific pound the coast in its infinite process, turning larger black bits of sand into tinier bits. We hiked the Cathedral Trees Trail and the Fern Canyon Trail, sometimes laughing as the trees dripped on our backs, more often silenced in awe by the mere presence of these giants.

We explored an old giant, half living, half in various states of decay. The ancient tree offered us a rare view — we ducked into an opening between two roots and stood in the inner chamber of a redwood. We were in the tree’s inner sanctum, and when we peered  upwards, we had a view of the canopies of the surrounding trees.

Travel like this – time to explore, connect, breathe – it is the stuff of the mystical. A bit of the spiritual, a bit of the poetic, a bit of the artistic and the naturalist. A time to search for our deepest desires, our truest meaning – that which we hold within, an inkling of what we might yet be.

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Bo Mackison is photographer, traveler, collector of stories, naturalist, and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.  In August, I stood in the redwood groves of the coastal California, in awe, and I remain humbled by their magnificence.