Ever Present Beauty: For the Love of Trees

Do you have a favorite time of year when you find the trees especially beautiful? Myself, I can't decide between the delicate blooms and translucent greens of spring, leafy cool shade during the summer, vibrantly colored canopies in the fall, and the structurally striking bare months of winter. As I learn to navigate the world more frequently with all five senses engaged, I continue to be in awe of the diversity of trees that surround me everywhere I go. How blessed we are to have such beauty in our lives...

On this perfect June day in the Sierra Nevada, the vanilla spiced air is filled with steady birdsong and a tinge of coolness from the occasional breeze. Standing on the gently sloping forest floor at its base, I crane my neck to gaze up the trunk of a Sequoia tree. I feel the soft and spongy thickness of its bark under my fingertips and hear the hollow sounding thunk as I pat it firmly with my open palm. The resulting cloud of stirred dust hangs suspended in a shaft of sunlight that streams through the canopy.

Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in Sequoia National Park

The crisp clatter of dancing cottonwood leaves sprinkles down from above as strong sunshine strikes the drying grass. The earthy sweet scent of freshly fallen leaves wafts up from the warm ground as I lie on my back on the picnic table looking into the cerulean sky. This beauty astounds me to the point where everything else is stripped away - thoughts, words, memories, ideas - and I am left with only an awareness that I am alive on this glorious day and that there is nothing more in the world I could want or need than this moment.

Eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoides) at Rattlesnake Springs

Long thin shadows stretch across the wind-blown snow as the last few hours of winter sunlight linger on the horizon. The interlaced silhouette of trunks and branches filters out almost all perceptible traces of warmth. A sense of cold, hard stillness and of life delayed makes everything feel sharper - the brittle vegetation, the powdery air, and the angular bareness of the trees, which will be lush with life and color in just a few months. For now the landscape sleeps with only the tracks of hardy mammals and the ripples of wind skimming across its surface.

Mixed forest of deciduous trees at Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge

Morning sunlight is just starting to creep over the tops of the rocks in Hidden Valley spreading a warm glow over the twisted shape of a dead juniper tree. Reincarnated as a home for cavity nesting birds, food for insects, and lookout for aerial hunters, this tree will live on in its new form until gravity moves it into the next phase of rebirth. I admire its unintentional beauty and sculptural grace, hard pressed to fathom how any human artist could perfect upon this natural form.

Single-leaf pinyon pine (Pinus monophylla) Joshua Tree National Park

The rain filters down through the canopy in a fine mist as I climb up the path from the stream bed below. Towering in front of me is an architectural mass of columns and buttresses simultaneously sinking down into the earth and arching overhead. The energy present in this rainforest is palpable. Plants are rooting, clinging, inching and unfurling in every direction, crowding the edges of the paved trail with anticipation. The strangler fig, in particular, has perfected the art of thriving in a highly competitive environment - it attaches to a host tree for support and eventually surrounds and absorbs it. In this place it is not so easy to forget that life and death are two sides of the same coin.