Adapted from
“Mind in the Forest”
Scott Russell Sanders
I touch trees, as others might stroke the fenders of automobiles or finger silk fabrics or fondle cats. Trees do not purr, do not flatter, do not inspire a craving for ownership or power. They stand their ground, immune to merely human urges. Saplings yield under the weight of a hand and then spring back when the hand lifts away, but mature trees accept one’s touch without so much as a shiver. While I am drawn to all ages and kinds, from maple sprouts barely tall enough to hold their leaves off the ground to towering sequoias with their crowns wreathed in fog, I am especially drawn to the ancient, battered ones, the survivors.
Some while ago, the allure of ancient trees drew me to the Willamette National Forest in Oregon, where I spent a week among Douglas firs, western hemlocks, western red cedars, and Pacific yews, the oldest of them ranging in age from five hundred to eight hundred years, veterans of countless fires, windstorms, landslides, insect infestations, and floods. And now they were contending with a destabilized climate, a tattered ozone layer, invasive species, and other hazards imposed by humans.
Each morning at first light I followed a path from the Forest Service cabin where I was staying to a nearby creek, and each time I stopped along the way to embrace the same giant Douglas fir, which smelled faintly of moist earth. I wore no watch. I did not hurry. I stayed with the tree until it let me go.
When at length I leaned away, I touched my forehead and felt the rough imprint of the bark. Gazing up the trunk, I spied the dawn sky fretted by branches. Perspective made the tops of the surrounding, smaller trees appear to lean toward this giant one, as if conferring. The cinnamon-colored bark was like a rugged landscape in miniature, with flat ridges separated by deep fissures and furred with moss. A skirt of sloughed bark and fallen needles encircled the base of the trunk. Even in the absence of wind, dry needles the color of old pennies rained steadily down. ticking against my jacket.
I don’t imagine that my visits meant anything to the Douglas fir. But how could I know a tree’s inwardness? Certainly there was intelligence in this great being, and in the forest as a whole, if by intelligence we mean the capacity for exchanging information and responding appropriately to circumstances. How does a tree’s intelligence compare with ours? What can we learn from it? And why, out of the many giants thriving here, did this one repeatedly draw me to an embrace?
The only intelligence I can examine directly is my own and, indirectly, that of my fellow humans. We are a contradictory lot. Our indifference to other species, and even to our own long-term wellbeing, is demonstrated everywhere one looks, from the depleted oceans to the heating atmosphere, from poisoned wetlands to eroding farmlands and forests killed by acid rain. Who can reflect on this worldwide devastation and the swelling catalogue of extinctions without grieving? And yet it’s equally clear that we are capable of feeling sympathy, curiosity, and even love toward other species and toward Earth. Where does this impulse come from, this sense of affiliation with rivers and ravens, mountains and mosses, turtles and trees? How might it be nurtured? What role might it play in moving us to behave more caringly on this beleaguered planet?
Sitting beside the creek, in the presence of ancient trees, I gradually let go of such questions and returned my awareness to the water sounds, the radiant autumn leaves, the wind on my cheek, the stony cold chilling my sitting bones. Eventually, the fretful I quieted down, turned transparent, and vanished.
Eventually I stirred, roused by the haggle of ravens, the chatter of squirrels, and the scurry of deer—other minds in the forest—and I made my way back along the trail to the zone of electricity and words. As I walked, it occurred to me that meditation is an effort to become for a spell more like a tree, open to whatever arises, without judging, without remembering the past or anticipating the future, fully present in the moment. The taste of that stillness refreshed me. And yet I do not aspire to dwell in such a condition always. For all its grandeur and beauty, for all its half-millennium longevity, the Douglas fir could not ponder me, could not reflect or remember or imagine—could only be. Insofar as meditation returns us to that state of pure, unreflective being, it is a respite from the burden of ceaseless thought. When we surface from meditation, however, we are not turning from reality to illusion, as some spiritual traditions would have us believe; we are reclaiming the full powers of mind, renewed by our immersion in the realm of mountains and rivers, wind and breath.
There are no boundaries between the forest and the cosmos, or between myself and the forest, and so the intelligence I sensed there is continuous with the intelligence manifest throughout the universe and with the mind I use to apprehend and write of it, and with your mind, reader, as you comprehend these words.
SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS is the author of more than twenty books of fiction, essays, and personal narrative, including Dancing in Dreamtime, Divine Animal, Hunting for Hope, and The Way of Imagination. Read More
“Mind in the Forest” © 2010 by Scott Russell Sanders; first published in Orion; collected in the author’s Earth Works: Selected Essays (Indiana University Press, 2012); used by permission of the author.