I can remember some years ago cutting down a birch tree as a woman sat nearby and wept. She did not create some kind of scene or carry on in protest. She just sat across the lawn from where I worked and cried into her cupped hands on a bench.

I asked her if she was ok. She said she was ok, but that she was terribly sad to see the tree go because she and her partner had planted it together, and watched it grow, and that her partner had since died, and in that tree this woman had a strong connection to someone that was no longer here in this world. And as I cut the tree, her connection was also severed. And this brought to light for me Yeats’ idea, that “there is another world, but it’s in this world.”

I’ve always had a strong sense of people’s emotional connection to trees working as an arborist. Be it pain or happiness, or vengeance, or fear, or hope; trees invoke strong emotions in people, they become strong symbols, they tell fascinating stories, they are anything but silent. Trees are, in fact, worlds within this world.

Annie Dillard wrote, “I never saw a tree that was no tree in particular.” What truth there is in that! How many limbs I have stood on, looked up at, and not one the same shape or size. And at the end of that limb, a bud will continue to break, new leaves will unfurl and grow forward, outward, upward. A Ruby-throated Hummingbird will hover nearby, and perhaps a grain of tropical sand falls out of it’s hackle and down onto the tree’s roots. So we are all travelers that can taste the tropics! This is what a tree has taught me: the quality of detail.

Viktor E. Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning recounts a conversation he has with a woman in a concentration camp just before her death. He writes that, “Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, ‘This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.’ Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. ‘I often talk to this tree,’ she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. ‘Yes.’ What did it say to her? She answered, ‘It said to me, ‘I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life.'”

There is hope in such a stillness like that. To look out of a window and see eternal life on the branch of a tree. To feel that kind of calm. We are moved, we are transported, in the top of a tree, out on a branch-trees grow in that wonderful space between heaven and earth. Singular, silent and still, we can breathe and our breath is taken away.