When trees speak

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The trees on the road leading home, they stand single file in a line that winds for a half mile, with naked spindly arms raised high.  I pass by them and I'm all astir with longing and recognition.  It's still winter, and they are stripped bare, unashamed, with arms outstretched and waiting to be clothed with soft buds of spring.  

I see myself in their barrenness.  I only long to see myself in their unabashed anticipation.  Like children, they seem to know they will be clothed in beauty, cared for by the hands of a loving Father, and they wait, with arms stretched high, reaching out fingers to grasp the Divine.

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I walk through the forest, down, down and further down the ravine.  Past garments of moss on ancient, weathered trunks and vines woven as strands not easily broken, up and out of sight in the treetops.  I walk on hallowed ground and God lives here, too, among the woodpeckers and robins, the trees and stumps and trickling streams.  The further down I travel, the smaller I become, as I look up and up the steep hillside of towering forest that testifies of life that goes on in old and new.  Comfort finds me here, in smallness, tucked away in something larger and older than myself.  If only these towering woods could speak, the stories I would hear at the trunks of their feet, laid down in the beds of moss.  

And my soul knows her Shepherd in these woods, made to rest in green, led over a bridge of quiet waters, a breath of restoration in the valley of the shadow. 

Linking up with Heather over here at Just Write.