There are big trees in northwestern California with the power to make another universe.  People drive past, oblivious to the grandeur and history and power encoded into those trees.  I’m referring to the ancient redwood trees - of which there are only about 4% left.

As we imagine cars driving by - people talking about this or that - we ask how can you be so asleep?  How can you be so disrespectful toward things that have lived hundreds of years?  What is the definition of stupidity?  Isn’t it our relentless insistence on ignoring that which can most help us understand what the world could and should be?  What we ourselves can and should become?  Imagine what we might learn if we spent just 15 minutes listening to what a 900-year old tree has to say.

“In The Woods is Perpetual Youth”

Emerson - who was about 14-years older than Thoreau and became Thoreau’s mentor for a time - understood the value of just being in the midst of nature.  Quietly listening.  He said “Nature - to go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.  I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me.  But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars...

“...In the presence of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows...Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.  I am glad to the brink of fear.  In the woods, too, a man casts off years, as the snake his slough, and at what period of life is always a child.  In the woods is perpetual youth.”

The poet/author Robert Bly - who has written widely about Thoreau and Emerson as well as other men and woman whose life was connected to something larger than themselves - says that the young man or woman who becomes attached to something larger than themselves - that finds work in some larger purpose than the acquisitive existence perpetuated by the Industrial Revolution - has realized that “certain things are as they have always been, and that in human growth the road of development goes through nature, not around it.”