Daily Jots

Thought of the Day:
“No two trees are alike. And their individuality is no imperfection. On the contrary: The perfection of each created thing is not merely in its conformity to an abstract type but in its own individual identity with itself. This particular tree will give glory to God by spreading out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did or will do.”
Thomas Merton

Thinking Outside of the Box:
I have been inside a lot lately. It is seriously cold out there! I guess that is to be expected in January. So while I am inside knitting, or reading, or dealing with teenagers, I tend to look out the window a lot. I have an elm tree outside my living room window. I love that tree. It is like a tree from a kid’s book – all branchy and just aching to be climbed or have a treehouse built inside of it. It is my tree and there is no other like it.

I tend to do a lot of personification with things. To me, my tree is doing some thinking of its own. Being deciduous, it is rather bare these days. I imagine it is waiting anxiously for spring, when leaves begin to sprout. Perhaps it plans how it will raise itself regally to the sky, instead of stealing itself against the wind and snow drifts. I think about the little birds all shivering in the bare branches waiting for the safe shelter of green glory and how much anticipation they must feel.

I doubt trees think. Not like we do, at any rate. I don’t know if they have any sort of real consciousness or not. I just know they are part of this world and a part that makes it a better place to live. They clean our air, provide oxygen and make things prettier. They allow children flights of fantasy and give us permission to hide our memories, and sometimes our carved initials, within their bark. We can laze away in a hammock under a tree’s branches and it will support us and shade us from the sun.

Maybe when the weather gets warmer and the leaves have returned, we should all shed our inhibitions, find our favorite tree and climb it. Just sit amongst the branches and enjoy the magestic reach to heaven. I think I just may do that!

Just think about it.

Some Last Thoughts:
“Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.”
Rabindranath Tagore

“I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.”
Henry David Thoreau

“In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.”
John Fowles

“… every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures.”
Ellen Glasgow

“There was a handsome male mockingbird that sang his heart out every morning during the nesting season from the top of a tall Norfolk Pine tree. Last week the tree was cut down. The mockingbird and his song are gone. I can’t put a dollar value on the tree nor on the mockingbird nor on his song. But I know that I – and our whole neighborhood – have suffered a loss. I wouldn’t know how to count it in dollars.”
Jacquelyn Hiller

Technorati Tags: quotes, trees

Comments Off