I’m thinking of a title for my as-yet unwritten book, how does Everything I need to know I learned in the Redwoods sound. Too familiar? Okay, then, here are the top ten reasons why the Redwoods beat post-election prognosticating.
10. They are quiet. Really quiet. Profoundly quiet. I hadn’t realized how anxiety-producing and serenity-snatching all this talk, talk, talk is. Because this is the off-season, it sometimes felt like I was the only person in the forest. I must make time for more of this.
9. It’s impossible to take the grandeur of the Redwoods in a single glance. It requires the observer to lean back to allow her gaze to follow the impossibly long trunks upward to see the tree tops. Life’s like that –complicated, challenging, unknown. We have to keep searching to understand more.
8. The Redwoods don’t brag or threaten or try to invoke fear. They let their size, strength and resiliency speak for itself.
7. Thanks to the People’s Republic of California, there are clean public restrooms in the strangest but most helpful places. Reminding me that I have what I need.
6. Big trees fall down. I’m sure when it happens, it sounds like the end of the world has arrived. But on the backs of those fallen soldiers, a new generation of trees take root. Every time.
5. The trees are so tall and the forest so dark and dense. If you don’t look up, you might miss the sky altogether.
4. I saw forests nearly obliterated by logging, repeatedly culled by wildfire, threatened by floods, droughts, erosion, and pest infestations. And still they stand.
3. There’s a lot of fog in the forests up here, coating everything you see in a haze, rendering it flat and lifeless (and particularly ill-suited for photography, I might add). But just when you start to despair, the sun breaks through tranforming the forest into a cathedral of light and air and inspiration.
2. In photography, a successful composition compels me to choose. Trying to capture the whole forest is too overwhelming because there’s too much detail, too many distractions and no order. Taking a good photograph (let alone a great one) requires me to focus on exactly what I want my viewer to see. We can’t address everything. The same is true in life.
1. Most of these Redwoods are older than the United States of America. Some of them were forty feel tall when the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. Four years is nothing.
Boonedoggler 