2009 Calendar Sample Pages

Extract from the Calendar's Introductory Essay

What the Trees Taught

by Richard Caniell, founding member and director of the Valhalla Wilderness Society in British Columbia, Canada

Many of those who love the Earth love trees above all. There is, in their solid strength and patient, outstretching branches, something akin to a silent testament that we love and honour. In boyhood, especially in the years between ten and twelve, I spent most of my time in the forest, often embracing trees, my arms around their solid woody breadth as if they were some paternal authority who might answer questions I did not know how to ask.

Much later in life, having left the city and my profession to live in the mountains of British Columbia, I spent both days and nights in the forest. I often roamed at midnight, looking up at the leafless branches of the aspens to see the tree limbs forming a net filigreed with stars. In those years I sat for long periods gaining a sense of a waiting, watching stillness, of a hushed, reverent spirit that exuded from everything growing.

Trees are perpetual teachers. As they go through their seasonal cycles, they teach us about the seasons of our lifetimes, about the renewal of life. Near my home, in forests hundreds of years old, one is constantly aware of the process of death and rebirth when seeing the old giants lying on the forest floor, a line of sturdy young trees springing from their crumbling trunks. But there are also many other things to feel and learn from trees.

I was in my mid-thirties when I broke through to an understanding of the innate philosophy and teaching that trees embody. In the forest, on a steep slope above the lake near my home, I encountered a massive fir tree. This patriarch of the forest had begun as a seedling perhaps 500 years previously, growing horizontally out of the steep embankment for a considerable distance. In later years it had gradually corrected itself, growing in an ever more vertical direction as all trees do. When it had compensated for the angle of the slope, it then grew straight and glorious, the prototype fir tree, quite as if it had never been deformed by its original condition.

I was dazzled by the significance of this. The ideal growth pattern of the tree had always been there, but the parched, steep slope had obstructed its manifestation. There had come a time when it reached an equilibrium with the marring forces that had bent it for so long, and then it had sprung upward, true, pure, elegant and divine.

I staggered back to my cabin in the dusk of that day, quite drunk with what I had learned. The tree had told me that even a deformed fir tree contains its prototype, its ideal. This meant, by extension, that a person also contains the prototype of an ideal human being. That essence, or quality, is innate, involuntary and ready to manifest straight and strong, once we have freed ourselves from the forces that suppress and distort our growth. So much of my internal struggle and pain had been based on a lack of faith. Having faith meant letting go of who I wanted to be, for only then would I be free to grow into who I really was.

Some time later, another tree taught me how to live. Hidden in the forest was an abandoned homestead, now 80 years grown over and going wild. There, in a small field amidst the flattened weeds of autumn, was an ancient apple tree. Some of the tree was dead, but the part that lived was festooned with fruit. As I looked at the tree, I recognized that it produced apples, not for pickers and eaters, not for the deer nor bears which grazed beneath its branches, not for the winter birds, nor even to enrich the ground from which it grew, though it served all those purposes; but because bearing fruit is the essential nature of the apple tree. So thereafter I looked for the individuals who shed involuntary beneficence as the overflow of their inner wealth, the fruit of true lovingness that is, in the human spirit, that tree festooned with apples…

Richard Caniell

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