Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Meditations of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Into the Green Future)
It has been said that trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem so to me. I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!
~ John Muir
(The Wilderness World of John Muir)
Who do you agree with, Emerson or Muir? I wonder, are trees frustrated by their lot in life, glued to one spot, or are they content to be firmly anchored into the ground? Or perhaps, like people, each tree has a different way of embracing the world…