I was beginning to imagine just staying in the forest forever. I was already five miles down the trail, and should have been heading back and on my way to a conference.
But the trees were whispering: Why hurry? Stay a while. What difference will it make a thousand years from now?
After all, some of these silent watchers have seen generations of people come and go for upwards of three thousand years. And they may still be watching long after the sun has set on our busy human world.
I’d arrived in the Sierra Nevada and the Sequoia National Forest the previous afternoon. Along with other visitors, I’d walked through the Sequoia groves – they’re like villages where the trees live in groups together – and stood by the world’s largest living being, the famous General Sherman tree. I’d driven up the Kings Canyon, carved out by a glacier ten thousand years ago.
And now I was alone among the silence of the trees. They were enormous, but not overpowering. Very welcoming at first. Almost entrancing. And now they were beginning to cast their spell. Perhaps I would just stay there forever.
Outside the forest, it was a brilliant, sunny day. But here life was in gentle shadow, with only shafts of orange light penetrating the canopy, glinting in the leaves and casting mottled shadows on the ground. Birds and squirrels chirped all around. Creeks tumbled and chattered as they set off on their journey toward the ocean.
And my other companion was a bear. I couldn’t see him or her. But the fresh paw prints, walking side by side with my shoe prints, suggested that the bear was either just some way ahead or had taken this same trail the previous night. Either way, it seemed we were together.
I should really be turning back. But, then again, why? Life would surely go on without me. And the world of people was beginning to look so ephemeral … transitory … full of sound and fury, signifying what, if anything? Civilizations come and go. How many of them have the trees watched in silence? Surely here in the forest was the real world – time measured in terms of eternity.
The soft, furry bark of a Great Sequoia can be up to two feet thick. Forest fires can barely penetrate the bark; instead they simply clear away the underbrush, enabling the seedlings of the giant trees to take root.
Temperate forests like this once stretched across the world – Britain, Scandinavia, Russia, America. To the ancient peoples who lived in them, they were not simply home, but a world that was complete in itself, a place of wonder and magic. The Northern Europeans believed that the whole world had been born from a great World Ash Tree. According to legend, their ancestor, the god Wotan, had come to the tree, sacrificing an eye in exchangefor knowledge, and cutting off a branch toforge a spear and lead humankind away from nature to create their own destiny.
Similarly, in the Mediterranean world, Adam and Eve had given up their innocence, plucking the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and abandoning nature to create their own world.
At the end of the 19th century, as civilization marched on, people were cutting down the Great Sequoias to use their soft wood for pencils.
A thousand years earlier, Christian invaders had cut down the great oaks of Britain in order to humiliate the Druids and destroy their culture.
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To ancient people, the Sequoia tree symbolized eternity, longevity, and wisdom. They would “knock on wood” to thank the spirit of the tree for granting them a favor.
Today the forests are but a shadow of their former selves. Many of them only live in protected areas, sanctuaries like we create for endangered animals. Their numbers are diminished. But their magic is as powerful as ever. They hold no grudges over what we have done to them. More majestic than skyscrapers, they radiate more life than any city, are more uplifting than any religion, older than some of the pyramids, and more beautiful than anything we can create.
That evening, a full moon rose over the distant granite cliffs, and the whole forest danced in its silver light.
The next morning, I bade farewell to the trees and was on my way once again. There was work to do ... or perhaps I was just not quite ready to be taken back into that world of nature from which we all come.
But the forest is still beckoning. And perhaps one day, when our human world reaches the end of what it can accomplish with all its ingenuity, arrogance, and folly, we will all look again to the forests – and to the great oceans and deserts and the rest of nature – and let them once more cast their spell upon us.
We can’t turn the clocks back and return to the way things were in an earlier age. But, like the prodigal son, we can still find a way to reconnect with the natural world that gave birth to us all, gives life to us all, and will one day take us all back, whether we go willingly or otherwise.
Reprinted with permission of Best Friends Magazine www.bestfriends.org
Michael Mountain is president and one of the founders of Best Friends Animal Society, a Kanab, Utah-based nonprofit driven by the philosophy that kindness to animals helps build a better world for all of us. Best Friends operates the largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the United States. 
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