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.

Yes, These are Redwoods and They are Magnificent!

Redwood Abstract

Redwood Abstract © 2013 Bo Mackison

“The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.”
~ John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley – In Search of America

Look at these trees.

Coastal redwoods stretching three hundred feet towards the clouds. Examine the details. Can you separate the grooved bark from the whispers of sequoia needles? Can you see your way to the sky? Can you hear their silence, your heart beating as you imagine standing in the red earth of ancient redwoods, peering at this generation of trees?

We hike the Cathedral Trail in Redwoods National Park.

Aptly named. Standing under the these giants, dwarfed and insignificant, this is more of a cathedral than any humanly constructed cathedral ever entered.

I creep into this time vacuum, standing with my palms pressed tightly against a tree’s bark.

I feel the heartbeat of the earth. Standing in redwood earth, crumbled mother tree from ancient days, her offspring encircle me. Nine trees in a ring, I stand and peer through leafy air, see only a suggestion of blue beyond treetops.

In rare sunlight, a potpourri of dust motes swirl about our faces. We are in the presence of the ancients, in a world we barely recognize. Silent soliloquy, the trees speak.

 In August, I stood in the redwood groves of the coastal California.

Meditation – Walking Fern Canyon in Coastal Fog

Coastal Fog

Coastal Fog ©2103 Bo Mackison

“In nature, everything has a job. The job of the fog is to beautify further the existing beauties!” ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

In fog. I am standing near swirling waters
gushing through Fern Canyon
towards the Pacific Ocean.

The creek’s container
Cliffs fifty feet high,
The creek’s container,
dressed in dripping ferns.

Sword ferns, five finger ferns.
The creek winds under fallen redwood trees,
twists along rock formations. Bubbling.

I walk east,
fording the creek on narrow wood planks.
Wet seeps through my hiking shoes,
The planks sag in the middle and frothy creek water
gushing over make-shift bridges.

My eyes follow the cliffs’ ascent,
atop there are skinny trees — not redwoods,
those giants grow further inland
— here are the skinny trees. In the fog. In swirls of dense ocean
these tree trunks gleam dark and wet.

Primeval. The scent of moist
and deep and old. An ancient call.

In Fern Canyon
the creek is the glory, the cliffs and the ferns
dripping, slurping, singing with water,
gushing life, this, nature’s glory.

Connecting with the earth and her waters.
Her message.
Take care.

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Bo Mackison is photographer, book-maker, collector of stories, naturalist, curator and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.  “I believe nature offers opportunities for connection, the arts offer opportunities for self-expression, and life offers continual opportunity for growth and self-discovery.”

Smoky Sunlight

Smoky Sunlight

Smoky Sunlight © 2013 Bo Mackison

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” ~ Henry Miller

A week on the road. My traveling companion and I are seeing many new things in new ways, driving on roads in a part of the country I’ve never visited. We took a back way from Lassen Volcanic National Park in northeastern California to the redwood forests on the Pacific Coast.

We negotiated six lane expressways, national forest roads, smoke drenched roads from a forest fire near Salmon Creek, road construction delays, a state highway that turned into a paved, but unmarked road that crossed a narrow gorge on a high, one lane bridge that led into a deep woods on a gravel switch-back road hat narrowed to dusty, washboard road.

Finally we emerged from the dark forest into a sun dappled prairie. A prairie? Yes! On the eastern fringes of Redwood National Park, we drove through a prairie, then an oak woodland, and finally we could go no further — the Pacific coast and huge cresting waves were the last of today’s continual rewards on this wondrous day of traveling.

Tomorrow we enter the cathedral redwoods. Hush.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is traveling this week, seeing anew.