Imagine starting out as a single seed among the ferns, a glimmer of what is to come.
Imagine drawing yourself up from a shallow place among those ferns, and then reaching a little deeper into the earth day after day, then filling out year after year, reaching and stretching for the life-giving elements of fog and the light, growing ever stronger, straighter, wiser.
Imagine sending your roots down ever deeper into the earth in this one place, unable to move except to sway, slowly, however the wind moves you.
Imagine finding all that you need in that one place in order to stand witness as generations of life rise up and fall away all around you, day after day, year after year, century after century.
Imagine being among others who didn’t make it, who didn’t find what they needed, sometimes right next to where you have stood silently for thousands of years, and watching them slowly give way to gravity over the decades as the bones of what they once were slowly feed the soil and everything else around you.
Imagine the stories you could tell, if only you had a voice to speak – and instead, the wind wafts and whips, as conditions allow, through each extended branch of your being, whispering or shouting a reflection of what is.
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We had the chance this past week to stop along the roadside and take some steps among these gentle giants, absorbing their silence and majesty, their wisdom, their lessons about deep time and patience and interconnection, considering the whole length of their long lives that will no doubt continue long after we are all dead and gone.
I love Laurence Cole’s song about the trees, ‘Trees Grow Slow’, and found myself singing the chorus of it to myself silently in the privacy of my mind as I walked among these giants. http://www.laurencecole.com/album/trees-grow-slow/
Here’s wishing you many long years of fertile soil, gentle winds, and the wisdom to stand witness and reflect this world exactly as it is.
Dispatches From The World of Singer/Songwriter Heather Pierson 