a Cathedral Grove
huge trees of Douglas Fir and Western Red Cedar
anchor themselves into the rich earth,
their roots webbing connections with all who thrive here,
they are pillars of will and endurance,
as the Earth lets the Sky know
she savors every photon of sunlight
to use to endure hundreds of years,
and hold beneath luxuriant gardens of ferns
such as the dinosaurs could have known,
the understory filled with less dominant
trees and shrubs and flowers, including raspberry,
plus moss and a lichen, named witch’s hair,
cover anything that holds still long enough
for them to drape themselves over all,
a cloak almost royal in how it transforms
the look of the forest into more than itself,
it pulls the eye to see the whole as a whole,
a temperate rain-forest that remembers
hundreds, even thousands of years,
and really countless millennia of endurance of self,
78 years ago a man who saw and orchestrated
the harvest of immense amounts of lumber in this area,
felt that this section of magnificent trees should be preserved,
so he made it so,
this old growth was named by him as Cathedral Grove,
for such high arching magnificence
pulls the soul up unto the spiritual,
as cathedrals were designed to do,
we spend an hour walking the boardwalk paths:
stopping, photographing, musing, worshipping,
the grove built itself at the edge of a great glacial lake,
fed by a clear stream that cuts through the grove,
rain visits often enough to supplement the abundant ground water,
I am reminded of cove hardwood forests in the Smokies
where conditions were just right for the largest trees to thrive,
our species needs the trees for their wood:
for our houses, for our furniture,
even for the boardwalks that allow us
to walk through this grove without damaging any more the trees’ world,
I contend we need, even more, the trees to be our elders,
wise with experience and a larger perspective,
to whom we should listen, and remember,
and we should slow down,
and learn again what we have forgotten.
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