I turned 70 this week.
A couple days later, Kath and I hiked some trails on Hoypus Hill. I looked around at the trees to see who might be older than me, who is younger, and to find life lessons we might share with each other, the old and the young.
I go among the trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles of water. My tasks lie in the places where I left them, asleep like cattle. – Wendell Berry
Some of the trees here are ancient giants, some just seedlings getting started, but mostly they are a mixture of various middle-aged trees sharing the forest floor as one connected family. There were hemlocks, firs, alders, cedars, maples and more. Underneath were forests of ferns, rhodies, salal, and ocean spray, and beneath them even smaller communities of grasses, mosses and mushrooms. And throughout the woods we saw dead snags, some standing, some fallen, each one hosting amazing assortments of new life.
Where trees grow thick and tall in the woods, the older ones are not allowed to fall but break and lean into the arms of neighbors, shedding bark and limbs and gradually sinking piece by piece into the rotting leaves and logs to be absorbed by next of kin and feeding roots of soaring youth, to fade invisibly to the shady floor in their translation to the future. – Robert Morgan, “Translation”
A sign along the trail advertised when one part of the forest had been harvested, shortly before becoming part of the park. “Planted in 1980,” the sign stated. This forest is now 44 years old. These trees are all the same age, except for the youngsters now growing in their shadow.
Every tree, every growing thing as it grows says this truth: you harvest what you sow. With life as short as a half-taken breath, don't plant anything but love. – Rumi
We walked in silence mostly. We stepped carefully around occasional puddles of mud, clambered over trees that had fallen across the trail, stopped often to listen to the chorus of kinglets, to one frog croaking in loneliness, or to nothing, a forest at rest on this late autumn afternoon, ready for the deep silence of winter.
The word “tree” comes from “deru”, a root meaning "firm, solid, steadfast," which also led to similar words such as betroth, truth, and endure. No wonder we revere trees so readily, as living examples of what we value.
A Young Apple Tree:
What you want for it, you'd want for a child, that it should take hold, that her roots find home in stony winter soil, that she takes seasons in stride, seasons that shape and reshape her, that like a dancer her limbs grow pliant, graceful, and surprising, that she know in her branches to seek balance, to know when to flower, that she turn to a giving sun, that she know fruit as it ripens, that what’s lost to her will be replaced, that change not frighten her, rather that change meet her embrace, that remembering her short history, she finds her place in an orchard, that she be her own orchard, that she outlast you, that she prepare for the hungry world, the fallen world, the loony world, something shapely, useful, new, and delicious. – Gail Mazur
Now here I am at seventy years, first as a gangly sapling, becoming a fruitful orchard tree, and now as an elder with wrinkled bark in the panoply of generations, all a prelude to tomorrow, whatever that may bring, and whatever I may bring to the future.
Our trails led us back to the southern roadway, a half mile from the trailhead. We strolled back hand in hand, having been blessed by this community of ten thousand friends, and reminded to continue to share and give so long as we have breath.
Directions
Directions: Take Highway 20 to Ducken Road, and follow that east to the end of the road. There is parking for a dozen cars, or half a dozen trucks with horse trailers.
By Transit: Island Transit stops on Highway 20 near Ducken Road. From there it is a just under a mile to the trailhead.
By Bike: As you know, Highway 20 is high speed, narrow shoulders in places, and rolling hills, but doable.
Mobility: Most of the Hoypus Hill trails are narrow, occasionally rocky, muddy, with trees across them in places, and very hilly, but the old logging road is a wide, gently rolling, grassy/gravelly alternative.
Republished with permission. Read the original article.