When Trees Were Allowed to Be Trees

A remembrance

I hope you don’t mind, Mark Crutchfield , that I borrowed the photograph from your note as inspiration for a post of my own.

I tend to write by following a feeling, and the moment I saw this image, I felt these trees were trying to tell a story. There was something ancient in them, something wise, something that quietly asked to be heard.

The poem below is my attempt to listen.

Written with great awe and respect.

Love,

Be

I saw this image

and suddenly remembered

the old days,

almost forgotten now,

when trees were left alone
to become themselves.

No one hurried them.
No one cut them back
for growing too tall.

And so they grew.

Higher and higher,

their roots sinking deeper
as their crowns disappeared
into cloud and weather.

People honored them then.

Not because they were useful,

but because they were trees.

Because they stood for centuries,
receiving rain,
holding lightning,
speaking with the wind.

We walked among them quietly,

heads tilted upward,

feeling something we rarely feel now—

that life was larger than us.

We knew,
without needing to say it,

that a tree reaching for the sky
was not escaping the earth,

but fulfilling its nature.

And perhaps we knew something else:

that what was true for the tree
was true for us.

For when nothing cuts us short,
when nothing asks us to become smaller,

we rise.

Not away from the world,
but deeper into it.

Like the trees,

lifting branch by branch
toward a light

that does not fall downward,

but calls everything upward.

© Be Budding

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Photo by Jan Suchánek on Unsplash

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