Trees

The passage in my book of Thomas Merton’s writings left me baffled this morning. It was a piece about the appropriateness of using enough or more than enough. To me it seemed his musing was a writing of its time, the early 1960s when the future for the American empire seemed endless and filled with possibility. Because it did not connect with me I went elsewhere.

What I found was a meditation on topiary by an Irish monk. The outrage at the act of topiary did not find resonance with me but some of what he said about the untouched trees struck me as very beautiful. Adapted here it is. The link to the original piece is http://goodnews.ie/jacobswellapril2010.shtml

How well trees keep themselves. They stand like great and lesser heroes, assuring us of some noble triumph far above our heads. Their full majesty appeared to us in a simple glance. How vulnerable trees are. How easy it is to love them: they are splendid beings, rapt in silence, and yet totally vulnerable, because they are alive. They show us, in some way, the heart of existence.

And how well they hold their secret! Their roots search deeply into the earth, a world of darkness, stillness and silence; no one has ever seen all their roots, no one is capable of following their infinite search. And how discreetly they reveal the secret! They raise their powerful bodies and intricate arms into the sky, intertwining the world below with the world above, giving form and meaning to what is formless: the darkness underground, too terrible to contemplate, they transform, without destroying it, into a hundred colours and shades; the rigidity of the earth they soften into an easy motion; its silence they interpret into music with the wind. When we come to die we can say: I have seen wonderful trees, in every season.

Don’t we all wish that our roots ran that deep?