Today was spent in the cheery company of my stepmom. Such a nice way to begin this eighth month of the year!
This visit was initiated by an email I'd sent to her about Daddy's trees. You see, a death in my ex's side of the family had led me back to the Arbor Day Foundation website, to order a group of trees for Gwen, dead after a four-year struggle with breast cancer. The site allowed me to choose where her trees would go: north to Minnesota or south to Florida. I opted for the Superior National Forest, as it will be better for family outings for those in Michigan and Minnesota.
Tucked on the sidebar of the site was the listing "View the Tree Registry." Curious, I clicked it and then followed it down the path to Michigan. Daddy's seventy-two trees are part of the Huron-Manistee National Forest. They'd had four and a half years to grow into new homes for birds, new food sources for small animals, new shelters for larger fauna.
Positive action, positive results.
She said, "Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go see them? Maybe in a few years, life will have slowed down a little for me ... I would love to take a long road trip up that way."
I agree. I wonder, in what part of the forest do they live? What types of birds call them home? Will the forest rangers be able to guide us to those particular trees?
Maybe, when we go, we'll just regard the entire forest as Daddy's.
That will work just fine.
Oh, in case you're interested, we dined on fried pickles and fried mushrooms. She had a huge BLT and I had an actual cheeseburger (!) topped with roasted red peppers, artichoke hearts, black olives and minced garlic. Quite tasty, and neither of us cared that I had dragon breath for the rest of the afternoon.
The movie we chose was "RED 2", mostly because it was an action flick that featured actors older than us. And who can resist Bruce and Helen and John? Not us! And who knows? Maybe one day we will be Retired, Extremely Dangerous, too!
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“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. 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 farmboy 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. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. 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.”
― Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte
Jeff and Amy were driving past and took this photo for me and Bonnie of Daddy's trees.
I still would like to visit in person...
but not with snow.
https://hindsightvisionfromtheocean.blogspot.com/2021/01/looking-at-daddys-trees.html
The link to plant trees in honor of a loved one has changed.
https://shop.arborday.org/commemorative?_gl=1*1j6l3x2*_gcl_au*MTkwNzQxMjQ5OS4xNjkxMzQ3MDE2*_ga*MTY1NDI3NjMyNS4xNjkxMzQ3MDE3*_ga_S539C3X6HH*MTY5MTM0NzAxNi4xLjEuMTY5MTM0NzE0Ny42MC4wLjA.
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