Home Away From Home and Redwoods

"Home" has come to be so many different things since we've been traveling two months with more on the horizon. It's consistently the little Honda Civic hybrid, and variably: volunteer housing - that lovely lake front house in Nebraska, our little summer tent (which, in northern CA, Oregon and Washington was much too summery) , a "tent cabin" ( new concept to me), various motels and, starting later this afternoon, a small ferry "stateroom" in which we will start our trip up the Inland Marine Passage to Alaska. Makes one reconsider the concept of home and to realize that this amazing journey is increasingly an internal one as well.

In this post, I shall include some photos of "home" as well as of the Redwoods.

These ancient trees touched me deeply. Not just their enormous size and age, but their magnificent presence. Like a revered sage, these trees seemed to have much to teach. I began to be aware that they share their life journeys ( some up to 2,000 years) through their structures - bending to the forces of wind; scarred and hollowed by intervals of raging forest fire yet persisting via protected resources; disfigured with beryls whose rapid overgrowth may have been stimulated by disease or other stress, those beryls then becoming a new source of growth. And finally, in death they become a nursery for new life so their species (and the many other species of fauna and flora they host in symbiotic relationship) may continue. Their root systems are relatively shallow for their great heights but are intertwined, the whole giving more strength to each individual within the grove. Their bark can be 1-2 feet in thickness which helps explain their ability to survive fire and their resistance to insects. I was awed by these beautiful trees in their still, peaceful world, and by their testament to interdependence, endurance and survival. Words and photographs fail.