Why the Old?

Why The Old?

“I enjoy talking with very old people. They have gone before us on a road by which we too may have to travel, and I think we do well to learn from them what it is like.”

Socrates, in Plato’s Republic

Old-growth forests take histories that are lodged in the imagination and bring them to life. Here, the ancient – people, culture, animal and plant communities – are brought down to earth, where our imaginings can gain a foothold. If this 2,500-year-old redwood was alive that long ago, so it is possible that Alexander the Great once lived, that Christ, that Mohammed, that Socrates once had flesh and bone. That a hemlock or white pine, now 500-years-old, still stands, takes Michelangelo from the shadows, brings Copernicus and Leonardo de Vinci to life, and makes possible whole, intact cultures of American Indians. Old-growth takes yellowed words on fragile pages and embodies them with real blood seen through green leaves. 

These old trees were alive back then, are alive now, will live into the future. They provide the rope that ties time together. They’re not fossils, not hardened amber, not footprints, not stories and histories imbued with human biases and imperfection, but living tissue, the griots of African cultures, the keepers of what has come before, the archives, the arboreal Smithsonian. In human life, so fragile and impermanent, we look for connections, bridges from then to now to what will become, and nothing but old-growth lives long enough to provide the crossing. Old-growth offers a time and scale perspective that is impossible to perceive in the short lives that we humans are given.

An old-growth white pine beams like the oldest of lighthouses, and though it may not have always lit the way of humans, it lived along the way, housed generation upon generation of lives along the way, and still guards the way, still illumines in its shadowing. Thoughts slow here, layers slough off, and we travel the rings of our lives, and the rings of those lives that made us possible.

Standing here now, I am part of that lineage, that continuity, the travelers, the thinkers, the seekers, the ancient. Under old-growth, I have the chance to feel a spiritual cohesion that the modern world scatters into fragments. Ancient people once stood under the same shade of the same sun of this same tree, and pondered the needs and questions of that time on this spot, that blink.

That a bristlecone pine can live 4,000 years and still sprout spring leaves despite fierce wind, sun, drought, and cold staggers the imagination.

            All of us at some point seek a vision, an overarching wisdom and grace that puts life in a perspective that can be encompassed in one horizon line. An old tree, an old forest, a wild place, does not automatically provide the vision, but it permits us to bid it come, and to think that it is possible.

            Beauty lives a full life here. Complexity spreads its wings, wholeness speaks as the final interpreter, and the sacred finds form. A forest that has lived and breathed uninterrupted, unfragmented, a forest where natural processes continue, where natural destruction is constructive, complicated, and necessary, is a sanctuary of beauty. And as all of us eventually learn, beauty is not optional, nor is the sanctity of solitude or the perpetuation of the sacred.