Happy Monday! I have trees on my mind again.

LitHub had an interview with W.S. Merwin last week. Merwin is a poet and his poems are filled with nature. I read him for the first time last year and he really is marvelous.

In the interview he says about trees and what they can teach us:

They’re everything. They’re a kind of life that is incredibly ancient. People say why palms and I say palms are 90 million years old and we don’t know anything about them. All you have to do is just pay a little attention to them and you can be learning from them all the time. You should be feeling a great pleasure in being alive. Trees have these connections between the roots and the leaves. A drop of rain that lands on the leaf of a tree is not the same as the drop that later falls down into the ground. There’s so much about it that we don’t understand and we don’t have to understand it. It’s not about understanding. It’s about our one life, our one and only life.

It’s about our one life, our one and only life.

We don’t get another chance. Let’s pay attention. Let’s do something to make the world a better place. For the trees and for ourselves.

Be strong. Be brave. Be kind.