I am not afraid to hug a tree. I mean really, to physically go out and embrace a giant. Please go ahead and call me a treehugger. I don’t care. I think that my dedication to preserving the beautiful creations of this Earth shows a hell of a lot more courage than your jaded ephitet. Besides, it really does feel good. Go ahead, try it sometime. It feels better than looking at your phone. It won’t let go. Together you can feel both the great, overarching connectivity and roots of this planet, and the sad music of how we can so easily lose it.
The last tree I hugged was simply called “The Old Red Oak” in the woods of Mint Springs Valley Park at our company retreat at Summit Publishing in Virginia. Yes, actually hugging this tree that had enough gravitas to be marked out from all the others in the forest was a joke. But sometimes it is our jokes that teach us the most. It felt good. Thank you, Old Red Oak. I know now why someone chose to name you. You are here alone now, the last. I feel you.
The Swiss writer Herman Hesse said: “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.”
Yes, and even in the middle of a joke and all the noise of deadlines and our self-defeating Internet news cycle, I hear that silence.
To tell the truth, I have always found solace by trees. I grew up around the giant oaks of the East Coast. One at the top of the hill of my brick elementary school would softly wave its leaves above me (and maybe drop an acorn or two) as I lay out on the grass looking up, no idea where or how my life would end up but simply grateful for a moment of childhood aimlessness. I loved the maples outside my bedroom window. Out West, I found cottonwoods, some of them hulking remnants, like sleepwalkers drifting out onto the plains as the power corridor of highways and condos forever eats up their once lonely praire. There’s the live oak I planted in front of my own house. I go out on winter nights and listen to the still rustling dry leaves on its branches under the stars.
Have you ever hiked through a clear cut? I worked in forestry. I have been certified to run a chainsaw and have to admit there are few thrills like putting the bar down into wood. I understand the realities. I have taken part in them, thinned, marked timber sale boundaries. But the planet is losing 18 million acres of forest every year. Those are not just trees that are gone from this planet: It’s understory, and habitat, and silence. And there are plenty of people out there who couldn’t care less. The oldest living thing on this planet is a 5,065-year-old bristlecone pine. It’s location must be kept a secret.
So try it. Just go physically hug a tree. Listen to its silence. And then speak up. Because someone has to soon.
