Читать книгу Like a Tree - Jean Shinoda Bolen - Страница 9

I often walk among the ancient soaring coast redwood trees in Muir Woods, the national park close to where I live in California. I have to crane my neck to look up at them, much like a toddler who would otherwise just see kneecaps or legs of adults. Though in proportion to the height of these trees, I'm not even at toenail level. These tall conifers are descendants of the green leafy tree ferns and first trees, without which Earth would not have breathable air, soil, or rainwater. As the BBC documentary Planet Earth succinctly said of our biological relationship to trees, “If they didn't live here, neither would we.” My study of trees began with looking up specific information about the Monterey pine (Pinus radiata), which is how I learned why it had been particularly suited to where I live. About the same time, I had begun a practice of taking early morning walks in Muir Woods. Both led me metaphorically deeper into the trees.

My wonder of trees keeps growing as I learn more about what they are and do. It has also been learning for the sake of it. Trees seem so ordinary and familiar and unmoving: they just stand wherever they took root and, until we know better, don't seem to be doing anything much. Those with the oldest lineage are members of the conifer family. The conifers do nothing showy—no autumn colors, spring blossoms, or glorious fruit—but when they are noticed and we understand how wonderful they are, a depth and poetic appreciation can result. Out of their wonder and love of the trees they study, naturalists have written about them with poetic sensibility. John Muir, America's most famous and influential naturalist, for example, described a juniper as “a sturdy storm-enduring mountaineer of a tree, living on sunshine and snow, maintaining tough health on his diet for perhaps more than a thousand years” (Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911, p. 146). Muir's ability to describe what he saw in the high Sierras and Yosemite Valley, to write of the awe he felt in the presence of the ancient redwoods, and to influence others had a significant role in preserving them, including Muir Woods.

In The Tree, a comprehensive book on the subject, the English author and naturalist Colin Tudge compares the building of a beautiful cathedral with how a tree grows, a comparison in which the tree comes out ahead:

[A] cathedral or a mosque is built; it does not grow. Until it is complete it is useless, and probably unstable. It must be held up by scaffold. When it is finished it remains as it was made for as long as it lasts—or until some later architect designs it afresh, and rebuilds. A tree, by contrast, may grow to be tall as a church and yet must be fully functional from the moment it germinates. It must fashion and refashion itself as it grows, for as it increases in size so the stresses alter—the tension and compression on each part. To achieve hugeness and yet be self-building—no scaffold or outside agencies required—and to operate for good measure as an independent living creature through all phases of growth is beyond anything that human engineers have achieved. (2006, p. 75)