Enjoy this very colorful and personal collection by Trish Nicholson:
G reetings from my tree house. For all who wish peace and love for the world’s people, its creatures and plants, I have assembled this tree-themed photo essay.
Trees especially, because, though in many places in the world it is the season for cutting down and decorating trees to display indoors, I prefer my trees to remain alive in their natural decorations, their roots deep in the earth-world they nurture with their embrace.
All the trees featured here are native to New Zealand, many are endemic – they grow nowhere else in the world. Some are male, some female, some bisexual; their juvenile appearance may be different from their adult form. I love them all. I raised and planted them all during the last seventeen years (except the tree house of course).
I have always felt the living presence
Of trees
The forest that calls to me as deeply
As I breathe,
As though the woods were marrow of my bone
[Michael S. Glaser]
I part the out thrusting branches
And come in beneath
The blessed and the blessing trees.
[Wendell Berry]
Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.
[Chinese proverb]
And see the peaceful trees extend
Their myriad leaves in leisured dance
[Kathleen Raine]
That tree whose leaves are trembling: it is yearning for something.
[Diego Hurtado de Mendoza]
I was raised by the song of the murmuring grove.
[Friedrich Holderlin]
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
[Robert Frost]
Walk idly around it and rest under its shadow.
[Chuang Tzu]
Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience.
[Hal Borland]
And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.
[William Shakespeare]
Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
[Kahlil Gibran]
a green thought in a green shade.
[Andrew Marvell]
In whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent and intimate hours.
[Marcel Proust]
Every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.
[Martin Luther]
What did the tree learn from the earth to be able to talk with the sky?
[Pablo Neruda]
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
[George Bernard Shaw]
Let me desire and wish well the life
These trees may live when I
No longer rise in the mornings.
[Wendell Berry]
That my soul may repose on the branches of the trees which I planted,
[Part of an inscription on an ancient Egyptian tomb]
[With gratitude to online sources of poetry: Spirit of Trees; Poetry in Nature; Interesting Literature]
Dr Trish Nicholson, a social anthropologist, is the author of “A Biography of Story, A Brief History of Humanity”, a global social history of the power of stories in the comedy and tragedy of human affairs.
“Stories are like deep-rooted trees that survive through flood, drought, heat and cold to provide fruits that nourish each generation gathered within the shade of their branches.”
[A Biography of Story, A Brief History of Humanity p.413]
Please visit Trish’s website: Words in the Treehouse
*Guest Post
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