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Trees outstrip most people in the extent and depth of their work for the public good"
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That each day I may walk unceasingly on the banks of my water, that my soul may repose on the branches of the trees which I planted, that I may refresh myself under the shadow of my sycamore.
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“I resent the creation of a world in which beauty is a reminder of what we’re losing, rather than a celebration of what we’ve got.”
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"We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears beauty." Ralph Waldo Emerson, American author/philosopher
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
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In the woods we return to reason and faith.
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"At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. "It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we have given heed to some natural object."
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Evil enters like a needle and spreads like a oak tree.
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Of the infinite variety of fruits which spring from the bosom of the earth, the trees of the wood are the greatest in dignity.
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"In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them, yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me."
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"...evolution
did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than John Fowles ***
“Even the smallest woods have their secrets and secret places, their unmarked precincts. And I am certain all sacred buildings from the greatest cathedral to the smallest chapel, and in all religions, derive from the natural aura of certain woodland or forest settings. In them we stand among older, larger and infinitely other beings, remoter from us than the most bizarre other non-human forms of life: blind, immobile, waiting….. altogether very like the only form a universal god could conceivably take.”
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Gradually, the trees were reduced from living spirits to little more than
timber sources.
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The forest is not merely an expression or representation of
sacredness, nor a place to invoke the sacred; the forest is sacredness
itself. Nature is not merely created by God, nature is God.
Whoever moves within the forest can partake directly of sacredness,
experience sacredness with his entire body, breath sacredness and
contain it within himself, drink the sacred water as a living communion,
bury his feet in sacredness, open his eyes and witness the burning
beauty of sacredness.
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He that plants trees loves others beside himself.
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“He that would have the fruit must climb the tree.”
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They are beautiful in their peace, they are wise in their silence. They will stand after we are dust. They teach us, and we tend them.
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I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets. It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful. Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.
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A
monk asked Chao-chou Ts'ung shen (777-897) (Joshu), "Has the oak
tree Buddha nature?" The Gateless Barrier, The Wu-Men Kuan (Mumonkan), Translated by Robert Aitken ***
The sycamore, also, was sacred. Peasants gather around them in rituals. In the Land of the Dead there was a sycamore in whose branches the goddess Hathor lived; she leaned out of it giving sustenance and water to deceased souls. In Memphis, Hathor's epithet was Lady of the Sycamore.
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The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
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"What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another."
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