Monday 12 August 2013

Trees

I have returned to the croft after a month in the arctic in June and then a month as poet in residence at the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Garden: two huge privileges and amazing to do them back to back. I blogged pretty much every day of July at www.walkingwithpoets.wordpress.com so it has been good to take a breath since I got back, and just be here in the wild wood. Each day there's another marvel to discover, or rediscover. It's that time of year when you get aromatherapy for free all day, every day - the soft sea breeze is dense with honeysuckle and heather blossom fragrances, and trees talk in their native tongue.

I've also returned to Hesse, as I do, from time to time, as to an old friend. Here he is on trees (from Wandering).

'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.'
Wishing you all childish thoughts, and happiness.

2 comments:

  1. Thought you might enjoy this:

    The Hills of Dream

    The tide of noon is upon the hills.
    Amid leagues of purple heather, of pale amethyst ling, stand isled great yellow-lichened granite boulders, fringed with tawny bracken.

    In the vast dome of blue there is nought visible save a speck of white, a gannet that drifts above the invisible sea. And through the hot tide of noon goes a breath as of the heart of flame.

    Far off, far off, I know dim hills of dream, and there my heart suspends as a white bird longing for home: and there, oh there, is a heart of flame, and the breath of it is as the tide of noon upon these hills of dream.

    Fiona Macleod
    From the Hills of Dream - 1902

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