If we will have the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow growing trees on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it... then a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live here, their houses strongly placed upon the valley sides...
The river will run clear, as we will never know it... On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down the old forest, an old forest will stand, its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots. The veins of forgotten springs will have opened. Families will be singing in the fields...
Memory, native to this valley, will spread over it like a grove, and memory will grow into legend, legend into song, song into sacrament. The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light. This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its reality.
~ 'Vision' by Wendell Berry
This is one of my most favourite oaks in the 'bog meadow' in Glengarriff Nature Reserve, a much loved old growth forest back home in Ireland.
It's always good to embrace roots and find grace in the still moments life gifts us.
A reminder to embody our inner Oak and ground deeply.