500 little redwood trees

"It pleases me greatly to know that some of these trees will grow and thrive and continue to bless people and the environment for many years to come."

(Sister Julie of Starcross Community)

*

Van Morrison lyrics:

Oh redwood tree

Please let us under

When we were young we used to go

Under the redwood tree

And it smells like rain

Maybe even thunder

Won't you keep us from all harm

Wonderful redwood tree

From Wiki:

In April 1971 Morrison and his family moved to Marin County, California, before he recorded his previous album, Tupelo Honey.  Their new home was on the side of a hill in rural countryside close to San Francisco, with redwood trees nearby.

"Redwood Tree" is a song of reconciliation, which seems to graft Van's Belfast childhood onto California, where redwoods actually grow, "Keep us from all harm", an invocation to the spirit of the ancient wood.

(Brian Hinton)

*

Could that song have inspired the creation of the largest redwood forest outside of the United States"

What is the Giants Grove?

*

Having grown up in the company of redwood trees, not all that far south of where Van Morrison and his family lived in 1971, I'm delighted to learn that Van Morrison, too, experienced redwood trees as protectors.  My request to my family and friends is that my ashes be placed at the base of a local coast redwood tree, one of very few in this part of the world and dear to me.

Refuge

When I was a child growing up in the hills on the outskirts of Redwood City on the San Francisco Peninsula, I spent much of my time reading in my bed and taking long solitary walks with our small family dog, Star, who was a beagle-fox terrier mix, black with a white star on his chest, a compromise because my father had wanted a beagle and my mother had wanted a fox terrier.  When I saw the header for this blog post, I knew I had walked in that place as a child but I wasn't sure where it was.  The simple photo of sunlight and shadow on a dusty path California clay path evokes a flood of rich childhood memories, sounds, sensations and how the California landscape held me and kept me safe.  It wasn't so much what the blogger wrote that brought back memories but his photographs.  He didn't walk in these places as a young girl in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

My best childhood memories are of exploring the natural world with our family dog and visiting the world beyond my world through books.  The blog post reminded me how fortunate I was to have lived where I lived at the time I did.  I doubt that small children or even older children are allowed to walk alone in the places that I walked alone.  I am also reminded that I was fortunate to have a mother who loved books and although she wasn't able to give me refuge in other ways and my deepest emotion in connection with her was fear, she shared her own ways of finding refuge from her own fears through books and art.

I look and look.
Looking's a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.

The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.

And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That's
a way of breathing.

breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.

Denise Levertov