Almost every day in Cusco I discover something new. Perhaps it is why this city has held my interest and curiosity for more than three months. A season has passed.
Most tourists pass through for a couple of weeks, and yet, after my extended time here, I still wake up every morning with a sense of curiosity and excitement, wondering what the day will bring. Each day I am still an explorer in a new place. I have yet to wake up and feel a desire to go somewhere else, to seek something that hasn’t already been found here. It keeps life fresh and interesting. It keeps me young.
This week I had yet another opportunity to explore. Since my arrival in Cusco I had heard about the Bosque de Eucaliptos or Eucalyptus Forests on the outskirts of Cusco. My daily adventures and enthusiasm for the city itself kept me from venturing out into my natural surroundings. As Thursdays and Sundays are my days off from teaching I have committed these days to exploring new places.
This past Sunday morning I ventured outside of Cusco and got lost among the towering Eucalyptus trees which overlook the historic center. It was my first time to experience absolute silence in these past three months, living in a city surrounded by people and music and activity all hours of the day and night.
The scent of eucalyptus, the return to nature, the absolute stillness was like reconnecting with an old friend who I hadn’t seen in a very long time. It was a much needed nourishment for the soul and a reminder of this place of silence and stillness I can return to at anytime.
Pair this article with Listening to Trees from Kyoto, Japan
Kyoto, Japan 2019
Field Notes
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But 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.
Trees by Hermann Hesse
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Zen and Ink Journals represents hundreds of hours of writing over the past decade, sometimes from a train in remote China or a coffee shop in Kyoto, a hammock in Costa Rica or a simple cabin on a mountaintop in Boquete, Panama or Ciudad Colón.
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