Nature is not matter only. She is also spirit.

-Carl Jung

‘Her aura is made of poetry, roses and galaxies.’

A STRANGE AND GRACEFUL LEGEND ///

Every crag and gnarled tree and lonely valley has its own strange and graceful legend attached to it.
-Douglas Hyde

THIS IS WHAT YOU SHALL DO ///

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

- Walt Whitman

RAINBOW W|ALK

Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.

- Robert Motherwell

UNITED IN PEACE ///

The forests are the flags of nature. They appeal to all and awaken inspiring universal feeling. Enter the forest and the boundaries of nations are forgotten. It may be that some time an immortal pine will be the flag of a united and peaceful world.

-- Enos A. Mills

INTO THE WOODS ///

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...

― Henry David Thoreau

Have you ever heard the earth breathe?

I wonder if anyone else has an ear so tuned and sharpened as I have, to detect the music, not of the spheres, but of earth, subtleties of major and minor chord that the wind strikes upon the tree branches.

Have you ever heard the earth breathe?

-Kate Chopin

SAVE THE TREES ///

 At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.

-Chico Mendes

e a r t h t e m p l e |

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. 

But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. 

No wonder the hills and groves were God’s first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.

― John Muir

nothing to fear ///

We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorous and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours.
― Marcel Proust

ME, the tree. ^^^

 When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.

- John Updike

P E A C E K E E P E R S ^ ^ ^

We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.” 
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees  

T R E E = Friend of Sea & Sky

What does he plant who plants a tree?
He plants the friend of sun and sky;
He plants the flag of breezes free;
The shaft of beauty, towering high;
He plants a home to heaven anigh
For song and mother-croon of bird
In hushed and happy twilight heard -
The treble of heaven's harmony
These things he plants who plants a tree."
- Henry Cuyler Bunner, The Heart of the Tree

verdant |||WALLS||| of the forest

'The other or eastern end of the isle was whelmed in the blackest shade. A sombre, yet beautiful and peaceful gloom here pervaded all things. The trees were dark in color, and mournful in form and attitude, wreathing themselves into sad, solemn, and spectral shapes that conveyed ideas of mortal sorrow and untimely death. The grass wore the deep tint of the cypress, and the heads of its blades hung droopingly, and hither and thither among it were many small unsightly hillocks, low and narrow, and not very long, that had the aspect of graves, but were not; although over and all about them the rue and the rosemary clambered. The shade of the trees fell heavily upon the water, and seemed to bury itself therein, impregnating the depths of the element with darkness. I fancied that each shadow, as the sun descended lower and lower, separated itself sullenly from the trunk that gave it birth, and thus became absorbed by the stream; while other shadows issued momently from the trees, taking the place of their predecessors thus entombed.' 

- Edgar Allan Poe, The Island of the Fay

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS

The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

- Robert M. Pirsig

POET’S T R E E ^ ^ ^

by Shel Silverstein 🍃

Underneath the poet tree,
Come and rest awhile with me,
And watch the way the word-web weaves
Between the shady story leaves.
The branches of the poet tree
Reach from the mountains to the sea.
So come and dream, or come and climb –
Just don’t get hit by falling rhymes.

WHEN GREAT TREES FALL by MAYA ANGELOU

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

― Maya Angelou

^ C E L E S T I A L ^ S Y M P H O N I E S ^

I hear the wind among the trees
Playing celestial symphonies;
I see the branches downward bent,
Like keys of some great instrument.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

TREES COME OUT OF THE AIR ^ ^ ^

‘Of course, you have to wonder about where the wood came from.

Well, it came from a tree, and the substance of a tree is carbon. Where did that come from? It comes from the air, it’s carbon dioxide from the air. People look at trees and they think they come out of the ground but really trees come out of the air. The carbon dioxide in the air goes into the tree and it changes it; it kicks out the oxygen, pushing the oxygen away from the carbon and leaving the carbon substance with water. (The water comes out of the ground, but how did it get in there? It came out of the air, down from the sky. So in fact most of a tree is out of the air. There’s just a little bit from the ground, some minerals, and so forth.) Now as we know, oxygen and carbonstick very, very tight. How is it that the tree is so smart as to manage to take the carbon dioxide which is the carbon and oxygen so nicely combined, and undo it that easily?” ‘Ah!” you say “life has some mysterious force…” But no – the sun is shining, and it’s the sunlight that comes down and knocks this oxygen away from the carbon, and now the oxygen is some terrible by-product which the tree splits back into the air, leaving the carbon and the water and stuff to make the substance of the the tree.'  

- Richard Feynman