I am not sure what it is, but I have been quite taken with the trees in Wales. The seem so big, grand, sweeping, lush, green. The words themselves can’t hold it all. I admit, however, that I don’t necessarily think they are better – or even bigger – than trees at home. Think, Glacier, the mountains around Helena, or the Redwoods in California. We have lovely trees in the US for sure.
So, perhaps it is simply that I have had the time to notice what is around me. Perhaps it is because I am attuned to the newness of it all, the freshness. Whatever the reason, I have tried to capture some of the beauty in pictures.
Like this tree on the path in the Billberry Wood. Doesn’t that arm just seem to welcome a sit?
And here is a tree I met while at the Old Hawarden Castle. I actually ducked under the draping branches. It wasn’t a ‘weeping willow’ – at least not like any I have seen. But it made a kind of tent from which I was shaded from the sun . . .and from anyone walking by.
Here are some of the others . . .including just some lovely greenery that abounds everywhere one looks!
It all led me to begin reciting that poem we probably all learned as children: Trees by Joyce Kilmer. It is simple – and, remember, it goes like this – say it with me!
TREES
by: Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
And, of course, not too far from where I now sit, the Welsh poet and priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote his poem God’s Grandeur.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
There lives the ‘dearest freshness deep down things’ . . . and, if the truth be told, it is all around us. If we but look. I go out now expecting to find a surprising tree, an inspiring shrub. That’s a nice way to take a walk . . . strolling through the world noticing. Even something as commonplace as a tree or a flower or a shrub – a kind of divine reminder that life is good and abundant. May your day be filled with an abundance of life and love!
Gladstone and Beyond 