There is a moment, every day, when the world seems to hold its breath. It is not dawn, nor sunset. It is a thin, invisible threshold. Some call it the stillness of waiting, others do not even notice it. But those who live close to nature know: it is the instant when the trees, the oldest inhabitants of the Earth, speak.
They do not use words, nor sounds that the human ear can catch. Their language is made of pauses, slight inclinations, imperceptible trembling of the leaves. To understand them, one must unlearn haste. One must stop “doing” and start feeling.
Once, humans knew how to listen to trees. Not just to understand where to build or where to look for water, but because they recognized in them a different kind of intelligence, slower, broader. A knowledge that does not need haste, because it measures time in eras, not in seconds.
There is a forest, not far from the city, that still endures. Despite the roads, the light poles, the metallic voices of telephones, that small ecosystem continues to guard its secrets. It is here that I sometimes go, aimlessly. I walk among the trunks, observe the knots, brush the bark. Every tree tells something.
There is one, in particular, that always catches my attention. An old beech, twisted by wind and time, but steady as a column. It has a deep scar along the trunk: maybe lightning, maybe a clumsy cut, I do not know. But that wound makes it alive in my eyes. Not perfect, but real.
Once I sat at its feet for hours. Not to read, not to think. Just to be there. And in that silence, so full, I felt something. A kind of echo inside me, as if my own body remembered being part of the forest.
I asked myself: what do trees know that we have forgotten?
Maybe they know that everything is cyclical, and that opposing the natural cycle of things is like trying to stop the sea with your hands. Maybe they know that there is no real separation between what is alive and what is dead, because every end is also a beginning in another form. A seed that rots, a leaf that falls: everything returns, everything serves a purpose.
Maybe they know that time is not a straight line, but a circle. And that every return is a chance to better understand what we had not seen before.
Science tells us that trees communicate with each other, through the roots, with chemical signals. That there is an underground network, a collective intelligence, a forest internet. But all this, the ancients already knew. They called it spirit of the forest, green soul, or simply presence.
We have forgotten it, caught up in the race, the urgency, the noise. But the trees are still there. They are not in a hurry. They wait.
They wait for us to listen again. Not to teach us something, but to remind us of what we once were.