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Sep 9, 2024 · Every culture has stories of wise people, ranging from monks and spiritual leaders to philosophers and mountain hermits whom travelers would consult for advice. But what traits do the wisest people on Earth all have in common?
- Finn Robinson
Celtic forest lore is rich with mystical creatures such as the Green Man, a symbol of rebirth and nature, and various other spirits and beings that inhabit sacred groves and ancient woods. Explore myths and legends of forest spirits from around the world, from the Leshy to Tāne Mahuta and the Brothers Grimm.
- Overview
- Pear ‘Survivor Tree’ | 9/11 Memorial, New York, New York
They inspire us, comfort us, and remind us how life moves on.
Every tree tells a story, but some are beyond eloquent, holding memories, embodying belief, marking sorrow. We hold trees in our imagination, where they grow in strange, wonderful ways in forests inhabited by fantasy and also by our fears. In fable and legend, a forest shelters spirits, witches, and once upon a time, a big bad wolf.
Also white harts that leap just ahead of the hunter’s arrow, and a hermit who may emerge just in time to nudge along a tale that ends happily ever after, but sometimes not.
We incorporate the rich metaphors that trees provide: We turn over a new leaf and branch out; ideas blossom and bear fruit. Though our momentum is sapped, our resolve remains deep-rooted, and yet there are times when we can’t see the forest for the trees.
Trees inspire, not just through language, but through ideas. Surely the most notable coordinates in the atlas of inspiration converge in front of a tree—an apple tree, surrounded by a wicket fence, in an orchard in Lincolnshire, England. There, reputedly, in 1666, an apple fell and prompted a young man named Isaac Newton to wonder: Why would that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground?
The spidery script of an 18th-century account in the archives of the Royal Society in London relates that Newton was home from Cambridge (plague had closed the university) when he stepped into the garden and into a reverie. Wrote his friend and biographer William Stukeley: “The notion of gravitation came into his mind … occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood.”
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After the conflagration of 9/11 reduced the 110-story World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan to metal carcasses, after a day of black smoke and ghostly ash, after the horror of 2,753 dead, the last living thing pulled from the wreckage was a Callery pear tree. It became an exemplar of the botany of grief, but also of resiliency. The tree was scarred on one side (at left, above)—the side chosen to face the main walkway used by visitors. “So they could see the moment when the world changed,” said Ronaldo Vega, the memorial’s former senior director of design.
After the conflagration of 9/11 reduced the 110-story World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan to metal carcasses, after a day of black smoke and ghostly ash, after the horror of 2,753 dead, the last living thing pulled from the wreckage was a Callery pear tree. It became an exemplar of the botany of grief, but also of resiliency. The tree was scarred on one side (at left, above)—the side chosen to face the main walkway used by visitors. “So they could see the moment when the world changed,” said Ronaldo Vega, the memorial’s former senior director of design.
Trees are nature’s memory stick, even at the molecular level. “Each growth layer that they put on every year contains a bit of the air from that year, transformed into carbon, and so the tree physically holds the years and years of the life of the city,” Benjamin Swett, author of New York City of Trees, said in a radio interview.
Some memories sicken the heart, like those summoned by the chestnut that stood outside the house at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam, where young Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. From an attic window, the only one not blacked out, Anne could watch a tree mark the seasons before the Gestapo dragged her and her family away on August 4, 1944.
Many mythical sages live in deep forests, on mountaintops, or in other places that are withdrawn from the world. Some are divine beings or demigods. In Hindu religion and mythology wise and powerful sages are called rishis.
May 18, 2018 · A sage is a wise or holy figure, often an older man, who possesses insight or understanding beyond that of ordinary people. In myths and legends, sages serve as guardians of special knowledge, helpers or advisers to heroes, and examples of wisdom, virtue, and goodness.
Sep 9, 2021 · Suzanne Simard is the forest ecologist who has proven, beyond doubt, that trees communicate with each other — that a forest is a single organism wired for wisdom and care. Simard found that the processes that make for a high-functioning forest mirror the maps of the human brain that we’re also just now drawing.
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Oct 19, 2023 · Highly wise individuals have learned from experience how uncertain, and uncontrollable life can be. They have learned to trust in their own strengths to deal with whatever happens.
