There is a place I roam, a short walk away from my back door. After the quiet village streets, the little forested glen charms you. It leads past old apple trees, young oaks and majestic Maples, through a twisty and almost sentient and hopeful forest. Up the grassy hill you are drawn. It’s said this place is haunted. Yet I believe it’s merely been wounded.

“The groves were God’s first temples.”
– William Cullen Bryant, A Forest Hymn

“It’s the flock, the grove, that matters. Our responsibility is to species, not to specimens; to communities, not to individuals.”
– Sara Stein, 1998, Author of Noah’s Garden
[all quotes from www.gardendigest.com]

“Ay me! ay me! the woods decay and fall;
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground.
Man comes and tills the earth and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality consumes:
I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit,
Here at the quiet limit of the world.
A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream,
The ever silent spaces of the East.
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.”
– Alfred Lord Tennyson, Tithonus

“Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. An I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.”
– Black Elk Speaks, The Great Vision, 1932, p. 36