Trees & Thoughts

A few years after publishing her most famous work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a brief essay celebrating a magnificent old oak tree she was fond of. She mused: “I sometimes think that leaves are the thoughts of trees, and that if we only knew it, we should find their life’s experience recorded in them.”

To extend this thought a bit further, one might imagine that trees are the thoughts of the earth. And not just the trees, but the grass, and the flowers, and indeed the houses wherein the human beings dwell who have their own thoughts—all of these, and everything else, comprise the thoughts of the earth. Or so it seems to me, sometimes, when walking on the grounds of what remains of the Nook Farm neighborhood, where the likes of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner, and Isabella Beecher Hooker once dwelled. Not to mention all the laborers who built their homes, the household staff who ensured the leisure necessary for creative thought, and those who grew the food that fed their bodies. All are the thoughts of the Earth.