Ode to Trees - Hermann Hesse, German-Swiss Nobel laureate in
Literature, 1946
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them
when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I
revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like
hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary
men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. 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. Nothing
is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. 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. And every young farm boy 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.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows
how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and
precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
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 labour is holy. Out of this trust I live.
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. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your
thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from
mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the
mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is
nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at
evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its
kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering,
though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the
mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward,
every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
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."
