as a hobbit with an ent

at the foot of redwoods

I like to be shaken:

by a sunset, a flower, a bear, a view,

it’s as if I’ve opened a present,

and it is so perfect for me

it’s as if the giver knows me better than I know myself,

Smith River, Stout Grove at the right, Jedediah Smith State Park, CA

that’s how I am with the great coastal redwoods

whose height, added to their breadth, scares me,

they put me in my place,

I am a little kid at the foot of the first mother and father,

in Stout Grove

I am Merry and Pippin with Treebeard,

an entity, a consciousness from before time,

one who speaks for the forest not axed into subservience,

complete into itself and with whom we can visit

if we are open to stillness and reverence,

we humans are talented at learning the way of things,

particularly if the things are “things,”

objects with no soul to confuse our mechanistic reduction,

a tree as the subject of its own story can come hard to us,

now research gives us the first inklings of a community within the soil,

of roots from related trees intertwining with each other

and actually sharing enough consciousness to share nutrients,

I wonder at the magnificence of the groves before me

and I wonder what it is I should learn from trees older than our country,

some as old as the millennium itself.

by Henry H. Walker

August 11, ’15