“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 fulfil 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.

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

My darlings, someone asked me the other day – how it is that I find such refuge amongst the trees; after all, aren’t they simply an offshoot of green?

To which I reply, my darlings – a tree is so much more than this gathering of leaves:

It is this roughened bark – in spots, worn smoothly; a testimony of the fortitude forged through ‘weathering’ these many years.

And, these roots – holding still, on this patch it calls home; determined to maintain sense of being.

In their rustling, there is a softened peace – a metaphor for life; within which, there is a hope…everlasting.

My darlings, this is the reason I do so love my trees.