I‘d like to share an excerpt from an article titled D.H. Lawrence on Trees, Solitude, and How We Root Ourselves When Relationships Collapse, in which Maria Popova, mastermind of Brain Pickings, highlights the relation-ship between humans and trees.
From a breathing perspective, this relation-ship is about co-existence and co-operation between equals. D.H. Lawrence takes on a similar stance in his novel Aaron’s Rod. In this passage from the novel, he captures the presence of cypress trees in Tuscany, turning the conventional paradigm of human communication and expression amidst a silent, passive nature on its head. Here it is the cypresses that „breathe“, „communicate“ and even „commemorate“, whereas mankind is diminished by a loss of reality, and of life itself through its own achievements of civilisation.
“He sat for long hours among the cypress trees of Tuscany. And never had any trees seemed so like ghosts, like soft, strange, pregnant presences. He lay and watched tall cypresses breathing and communicating, faintly moving and as it were walking in the small wind. And his soul seemed to leave him and to go far away, far back, perhaps, to where life was all different and time passed otherwise than time passes now. As in clairvoyance he perceived it: that our life is only a fragment of the shell of life. That there has been and will be life, human life such as we do not begin to conceive. Much that is life has passed away from men, leaving us all mere bits. In the dark, mindful silence and inflection of the cypress trees, lost races, lost language, lost human ways of feeling and of knowing. Men have known as we can no more know, have felt as we can no more feel. Great life-realities gone into the darkness. But the cypresses commemorate.“
You can find the full article with images here: https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/07/21/d-h-lawrence-aarons-rod-cypress-trees/