Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.Ī longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother.

You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.Ī tree says: My strength is trust. 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. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.Ī tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk 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. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. “For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers.

Siddhartha herman