Monet – penned in moon dust

I was talking to a fellow poet about trees this week. We were musing about the intelligence stored up in the trees. What mistakes would we bypass if we could access the ancient wisdom of the trees?

Have you ever contemplated what if would be like to have been under the teaching of Plato, or studied art with Monet, or ridden in a tank with MacArthur? Can you imagine the wisdom that those who have gone before us could impart to man today?

Survivors

Think about the Redwoods or the Sequoias. They are some of the oldest trees in existence – they have been through many wars, survived plagues, droughts, and general mayhem. These trees managed to keep it together during the Civil War. They held their peace when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. They felt the earth quake in their roots when bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Peace Summit

Think about holding a peace summit with the oldest trees in the world. I’m sure they could shed some literal and figurative light on the direction our world is going. They have seen and heard what has come from the ramblings and the idiocies of men.

Listen

What would the trees say to us? Listen really carefully and maybe just maybe you can catch a piece of a conversation between two senior citizens:

“Remember that young fella. He was almost as tall as the young saplings. He was interested in trees and mankind – honest too.”

“I remember when Teddy Roosevelt made a tribute to some of our relatives. That human knew a thing or two about trees.”

“You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.” – Treebeard

If only we would listen, maybe our world could stop the speeding train heading toward disaster. Trees don’t care about economics, but I’m sure they would love to see the human heart exposed. How would it fair if it were exposed?

The trees would expound on the merits of wisdom. Wisdom would be revealed in compassion for one’s fellow man rather than the popular getting ahead schemes of the populace.

Straight from the Tree’s Mouth

If we could only get a quote from a tree – hmmm

‘One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface were sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake.’ The Lord of the Rings- The Two Towers

If you have been reading my “I” series this is a different kind of “I”. Hope it causes you to ponder. As I stood beneath an old tree today, I tried to soak in just a little something – Intelligence??? Who knows…