Today, the first & last of every Tree/ Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River.
All of nature begins to whisper its secrets to us through its sounds. Sounds that were previously incomprehensible to our soul now become the meaningful language of nature.
When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
When we can converse with the animals, we will know the change is halfway here. When we can converse with the forest, we will know the change has come.
We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea.
Fresh air is as good for the mind as for the body. Nature always seems trying to talk to us as if she had some great secret to tell. And so she has.
So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.
I guess I’m a little weird. I like to talk to trees and animals. That’s okay though; I have more fun than most people.
enter into the life of the trees. Know your relationship and understand their language, unspoken, unwritten talk. Answer back to them with their own dumb magnificence, soul words, earth words, the God in you responding to the God in them.
I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.
It would never occur to most of us that 'plants' say anything at all, except in terms of what we read into them, or try to use them for. Yet in their responses to this wonderfully rhythmic and varying earth they are the most expressive of all forms of life.
I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough.
No one yet understands the mysterious intelligence within plants or the implications of the idea that nature communicates in a basic chemical language that is unconscious but profound. We do not yet understand how hallucinogens transform the message in the unconscious into revelations beheld by the conscious mind.
All of nature talks to me - if I could just figure out what it's saying - trees are swinging in the breeze. They're talking to me. Insects are rubbing their legs together. They're all talking. They're talking to me.
