Flowering Branch
by Herman Hesse
Always this way and another
A flowering branch in wind's sway,
Always ascendent and below;
And the heart sways innocent.
Day's brilliance yields to dusk,
Desire yields to release;
And the flowers now wind-drift,
The branch now fruit-filled;
The heart discovers innocence,
And insists: filled with joy,
Never futile, this restive game,
This life.
From Wandering: Notes and Sketches
By Herman Hesse
Trees have always been, for me, the most insightful teachers. I revere them when they live in bands and families, in forests and parks. Even more do I revere them when they stand singularly. They are like persons alone. Not like recluses who have fled the world for some weakness, but like great, solitary men ... In their heights all the world vibrates, their roots abide in eternity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down ... one can read its entire life in the brilliant inscriptions of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured ...
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.