From the preface by David George Haskell: “We cannot step outside life’s songs. This music made us. It is our nature.

Our ethic must therefore be one of belonging, an imperative made all the more urgent by the many ways that human actions are fraying, rewiring, and severing biological networks world wide. To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.”

I want to learn to listen better, not just to the forest in which I live, but to the individual trees along my path. It is easy to listen to the live oak that shades my house, and which preceded me by centuries;  the big leaf maples that planted themselves in my yard after the Wild Fire of 1996, and this glorious Quercus lobata that is also a volunteer from 1996. I babied them and tended them the first few years until they grew big enough and tall enough to care for themselves. Now, they nurture others. I just sit back and watch…and learn to listen to them.