"Have
you ever noticed a tree standing naked against the sky,
How beautiful it is?
All its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness
There is a poem, there is a song.
Every leaf is gone and it is waiting for the spring.
When the spring comes, it again fills the tree with
The music of many leaves,
Which in due season fall and are blown away.
And this is the way of life."
- Krishnamurti
Trees: Quotes, Poems, Sayings, Lore
"Larger and finer meanings are read into
the older legends of the plants, and the
universality of certain myths is expressed in the concurrence of ideas in the
beginnings of the great religions. One of the first figures in the leading
cosmologies
is a tree of life guarded by a serpent. In the Judaic faith this was the tree in the
garden of Eden; the Scandinavians made it an ash, Ygdrasil; Christians usually
specify the tree as an apple, Hindus as a soma, Persians as a homa, Cambodians
as a talok; this early tree is the vine of Bacchus, the snake-entwined caduceus of
Mercury, the twining creeper of the Eddas, the bohidruma of Buddha, the fig of
Isaiah, the tree of Aesculapius with the serpent around his trunk."
- Charles M. Skinner, Myths and Legends of Flowers, Trees, Fruits
and Plants, 1911
"Because they are primeval, because they
outlive us, because they are fixed, trees seem to emanate a sense of
permanence. And though rooted in earth, they seem to touch
the sky. For these reasons it is natural to feel we might learn wisdom
from them, to haunt
about them with the idea that if we could only read their silent riddle
rightly we should
learn some secret vital to our own lives; or even, more specifically,
some secret vital to our real, our lasting and spiritual existence."
- Kim Taplin, Tongues in Trees, 1989, p. 14.
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