A Grove of Ancient Cedars
geology works in millions and billions of years,
as does life in the totality of its stories and substories,
rarely can we find individual life-forms
who survive individually for up to a millennium or more,
today we hiked hard up the head of a valley,
along some ridges, and then into a sheltered cove,
where a small clear stream
shows how the water table
ministers to the flora here,
in this cove Western Red Cedars are
the chief elders to whom we should listen,
huge ancient cedars and fir have held their selves together here,
some for at least 600 years, maybe over a thousand,
one can’t count the rings of the oldest trees
since the center has rotted with time,
cedars now take 7 years to make a centimeter of trunk,
these trees can approach two meters in diameter:
do the math,
sadly, we humans can find it easy
to reduce “I. ..Thou” to “I. . . it,”
and these trees seem to me to be “Thou,”
the trees in this great Ancient Cedars Grove
were scheduled to be logged in the 1980s,
after neighboring groves were logged in the 1960s and 1970s,
somebody found the way to stop that happening,
how sad that our need for wood and money
can trump our need for camaraderie with lives
that stretch back to the Middle Ages.
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