Ode to Trees

Today we are removing some trees, scrub trees to be sure, but trees nonetheless and there is a small prayaschitta to be done. Yes, we are preparing the ground for more trees, many trees and much to live beneath those trees. Sad, our joy today.

So we give a small space to honor the tree. The photos here are of the immense and the ancient, the gnarled and the odd, but every tree is a bit of Siva's Self, howsoever plain and ignored by the wayside where it give life and shade to passersby.

Enjoy the slideshow and plant, if you can, 12 trees each year or see that they are planted.

You often say, I would give, but only to the deserving. The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture. They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.--Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet.

A tree is like a saint. It calls no one to itself, nor does it send anyone away. It offers to protect everyone who wants to come to it, whether this be a man, a woman, a child, or an animal.  Ma Anandamayi Ma, Indian saint.

And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each others shadow  Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon.  --John F. Kennedy, U.S. President.

Where trees are fallen, there is grief; I love no leafless land --A.E.Housman.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.  --George Bernard Shaw.

Tree limbs rise and fall like the ecstatic arms  of those who have submitted to the mystical life. Leaf sounds talk together like poets making fresh metaphors. --Rumi, Afghan poet, 13th Century.

No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.--Seamus Heaney, Nobel poet.

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