How Trees Can Help Us Find Equilibrium

When trees become metaphors of stability, life and promise

Photo by kazuend on Unsplash

Lately, I’ve found myself curious about trees.  I know it sounds weird as we face an attempted assassination, political rage, inflation and surging heat in the summer. But trees and living in the shelter of them have worked their own way into my soul. Perhaps, trees are gifts for us to offer a sanctuary—a lesson—a solace from the day to day stress we are navigating. This is why I think I’m drawn to trees more now, than at any other time in my life. Is anyone out there with me in this?

Living in the Blue Ridge Mountains, there are plenty of trees to consider.  Trees have always captured the attention of poets and writers and with my own interest, I’m reading what Joyce Kilmar, Hermann Hesse, Mary Oliver and the Psalmist have all collectively reflected on when they, too, focus on trees.

Read Joyce Kilmer’s beautiful, lyrical poem titled “Trees.”

Trees

By Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

(Joyce Kilmer, “Trees” from Poetry 2, no. 5 (August 1915): 153.)

Kilmer’s first line is a dead give a way to the alluring enchantment of looking at a tree—if we have the time—and take the time to actually look—actually enter the curious space in our minds and hearts to see beyond the literal tree we are looking at and see more—see something beyond our mind that can touch us at the soul level.

I think this is what the old poet did in Psalm 1 in the Jewish-Christian prayer book—the prayer book that Jesus knew quite well and probably like me, memorized.

Here’s a section of that Psalm about a tree:

Instead you thrill to God’s Word,
    you chew on Scripture day and night.
You’re a tree replanted in Eden,
    bearing fresh fruit every month,
Never dropping a leaf,
    always in blossom.

For the Psalmist, the tree became a symbol, a sort of living metaphor to get beyond his own mind and imagine the flourishing life of a fruit bearing tree that is always in blossom and always bearing fruit. Scriptures in the Old and New Testament are all filled with tree imagines from Eden to the tree of life in the final book, Revelation. Let’s face it, trees offer us something that might just help us—particularly right at this very moment.

Poets and scholars like Wendell Berry looked at trees and saw them as a “high timbered choir” praising God.   Mary Oliver said of trees:

When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

How can Oliver tell us so courageously that trees can save us—and save us daily?  Is “save” too much for some of us to consider in terms of what trees can actually do for us? Then there’s this line:

“They give off such hints of gladness.”

How can we find the “gladness” in a day and age in which we are navigating unspeakable horrors of assassination attempts, rhetoric that is so filled with anger that we all inevitably filled drained of gladness on any given day?

I suggest, we should look less at people and more at trees. The ancients figured this out long ago and in order to find our equilibrium; in order to experience this deep sense of equanimity, trees might offer us the invitation we are needing now.

I know—I know, in the midst of so, so, so much turmoil, how can looking at a tree possibly bring us something—other than a waste of time.

The answer to this question, I found in the words of novelist Hermann Hesse when he wrote these profound and staggering words about trees:

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.

If you go through Hesse’s words—line by line—you almost want to inscribe each line in a journal to keep them as a keepsake—to refer to them as a map to find your way to the land of equilibrium—a land of plentitude and shalom. I was so taken his words, that I bought his little volume, “Trees” and am reading it daily. It has the look and feel of a prayer book—filled with his art, poems and prose—all about the alluring nature of trees. (The link is to Amazon to show you the version I”m referring to and I recommend it.) I think we need prayer books these days—something to take with us that might fit in our pocket or backpack—something we can pull out, sit with and read a few lines. Hesse’s little book is that for me and I”m loving it.

I plan to take a pilgrimage soon to the “Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest” here in the mountains of North Carolina near the small town of Robbinsville.  I'm going there because of Kilmer’s poem and because a friend just told me, “Steve, you have to go. It’s the one of the most holiest places I’ve ever been.” So, go, I will and soon.  There in the forest is a protective grove of 400 year old trees, so large and massive three people, stretched around a single tree there, cannot completely encircle the circumference of these trees. We need something big—something bigger that we are to help us feel small these days. I suggest trees will do their part, if we do ours.

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Here’s a poem I have written titled, “What the Trees Do.”  The first line helps you understand many of the writers I have quoted above: “When trees become your books, you might be in trouble.”  But here I’m thinking it’s a good trouble—not a bad trouble. 

Right outside my glass office here at my mountain home, I can see massive beech, pine, oak, rhododendron, one of my favorites here, the Mountain Laurel which in the poem I say is more beautiful to to the Sistine Chapel.  See if you can trace my own internal movement as I try to give words to what the trees do. See if my words might elicit a memory of a tree you can recall—a tree that drew you as a child—a tree you found shelter under.

Then leave a comment about the tree. If possible, take a picture and post it for us all to see and enjoy.

My poems published on Substack are for those who subscribe and support my work. Your support means so much to me and encourages me to come up here to my glass tree house and open my journal and get out what I can get out through this new experiment for me. When I see new Subscribers, like this past week come in for the journey, I’m so glad. Most of all, though, it’s your comments that I am using to help me discern what poems worked and what poems may not have worked. For example, below, I am giving you a link to the poem I wrote about a Beech Tree I look at every single day. As much as I liked this particular poem, only three people commented on it…so either it didn’t much work, or perhaps not enough people read it felt like responding. I take all that happens on Substack here pretty serious—as you are my family here to help me muster courage and voice to now converge in the poems.