What the Trees Know

Wendell Berry has died. And thinking about him today, his profound works, his gentle reminders, reminds me of the impact of poetry. His focus on nature brings up wonder and awe in me.

I find myself thinking about the strange comfort we find in the natural world. It is strange because nature does not actually make our lives easier. The trees do not solve our problems. The mountains cannot answer our questions. A river cannot tell us whether the decision we are making is the right one. A field of wildflowers has no opinion about our failures, and the ocean is completely indifferent to our worries.

And yet we go to these places when we are troubled.

We walk among trees. We sit beside water. We watch the changing light across a field. We listen to birdsong. Somehow, without saying a word, the world outside us seems to quiet something inside us.

Why?

Perhaps because nature reminds us of something we have forgotten. We live in a world increasingly convinced that what is real is what can be measured. We count calories, dollars, steps, followers, productivity, years. We weigh things. We quantify things. We turn almost everything into data.

And then we go outside and discover that some of the things that matter most cannot be measured at all. How many units of comfort are contained in the smell of rain? What is the monetary value of sunlight falling through an old tree? How much does a mountain weigh in memory? What is the economic worth of the feeling that comes over us when we stand beneath a vast night sky?

We know these things are real. We simply don't know how to put a number on them.

That may be part of nature's quiet challenge to our materialism. The material world is not the enemy of the spiritual world. Perhaps the mistake is imagining that they are two separate worlds in the first place.

The spiritual may be woven through the material so completely that we keep looking past it. A loaf of bread can be both flour and nourishment. A human touch can be both skin and consolation. A song can be vibrations in the air and still break our hearts. A tree can be cellulose and branches and leaves ... and somehow become a place where a grieving person goes to remember that life continues.

Perhaps the problem isn't that we are too material. Perhaps it is that we have forgotten how to see the material world as more than material. This may be one reason nature comforts us.

A forest doesn't have to explain itself. It simply grows. The seasons do not panic when winter arrives. The trees do not spend February worrying about whether spring will come. The river does not demand to know where it is going before it begins its journey. Everything seems to participate in a rhythm larger than itself.

And my guess is something in us recognizes that rhythm.

We are, after all, creatures of the earth. We breathe what trees give us. We eat what the earth produces. We are made of the same elements we spend our lives trying to control. Eventually, our bodies return to the soil. And yet there is something in us that seems unwilling to believe that this is the whole story.

That is the curious thing.

We are material creatures who hunger for things that materialism cannot quite explain. We want beauty, but beauty is not necessary for survival. We want meaning, but meaning cannot be weighed. We want justice even when injustice would be more profitable. We want love that lasts beyond usefulness. We want to be remembered.

We want our lives to matter.

And most mysteriously, we experience moments when the ordinary world seems to become transparent ... as though, for just a moment, we are seeing more than what is physically there. A shaft of light through the trees. The first crocus pushing through cold earth. The sound of rain on a roof. An old field at dusk. A bird singing when no one is listening.

Nothing has changed. And yet everything has. Maybe this is why poets matter.

A poet like Wendell Berry teaches us to pay attention long enough for the world to become more than scenery. He reminds us that a field is not simply a field. It is a place. A tree is not simply a tree. It is an old presence. A farm is not simply property.

It is relationship, labour, memory, nourishment and belonging.

The natural world begins to look less like a collection of objects and more like a gift.

And gifts raise an uncomfortable question.

If the world is a gift, who is the giver?

If you don't have the answer to that question, perhaps you should be willing to ask it.

Because there is something deeply strange about a universe that contains not only matter, but creatures who can stand inside that matter and wonder about it.

We are made of atoms, yes.

But atoms do not explain why we weep at beauty. We are biological organisms, certainly. But biology alone does not settle the question of why we feel that a life should be good, or why love feels more important than survival, or why standing beneath an ancient tree can make us feel, inexplicably, that we are home.

I believe the spiritual isn't somewhere else. It is not floating above the physical world, waiting for us to escape our bodies and get there. The spiritual is what happens when we finally learn to see the physical world truly.

Maybe that is part of what Berry was trying to teach us.

To stay.

To notice.

To belong.

To touch the earth.

To recognize that we are not consumers standing outside creation, but creatures within it.

And, when we become quiet enough, the natural world comforts us because it reminds us that we are part of something we did not make. The trees don't tell us this. They don't need to. They simply stand there, rooted in the earth, reaching toward the light. And somehow, we understand, there is something greater. There is a maker, a giver; but it's not us. It's our extraordinary Creator.

Yes, the trees will keep standing. The seasons will keep turning. The earth will keep giving. And we, for a little while, will walk among it all, trying to remember what the trees already know.