The Talking Trees

Every tree in the countryside spoke to me, saying, HOLY! HOLY! In the forest, enchantment... Who can express all of it? Ludwig van Beethoven,1815 The trees will not speak to me. Their branches bend toward the earth. They are heavy with water, from three days of rain. Water drops fall from their leaves to the already saturated grasses. Perhaps trees and grasses stretch toward each other to form a wet green union, a blending of their identities as growing things that do not move from place to place, but exult in their stationary perfection. In the dappled morning light, I loiter between two maple trees, wondering which one will take notice of me, and answer my greeting with its own kind of salutation. The sun rises higher in the sky. No answering gesture happens. But a breeze grazes my face and no doubt receives some answering gesture from the leaves of both maples. I am a witness to this exchange, my hope is to be a participant in it. Do the trees have any sense of effort? Do they feel the movement of sap through all their branches and leaves as a worthy effort that makes them swell with success? Or are they simply living things in which a process perpetually occurs, with no sense of time, no awareness of what must be. Their existence contains no thought, no strain: in idleness they achieve everything in perfect sync. If the trees could read my mind, if they could register my feelings for them, they would acknowledge me in some vegetative way, some offering of their being, maybe a cluster of leaves falling in my path, maybe a silent gesture of branches conveyed as the wind swept through the tree on its mission elsewhere. Or perhaps the tree's soul would speak directly to my soul, meaning HOLY! HOLY!