Ned Hayes Quotes

My arms sometimes move on their own in big flapping motions, as if I might take off, and my hands spin like a hummingbird’s wings.

The trees reach up above me toward the sky, stretching out their great limbs in an intricate pattern that reminds me of the pattern of light... the pattern shifting back and forth as I climb.

The forest was all around me now... The ground soft and warm with light and growth... I could almost hear the ceaseless excavations of the flowing bloodstream underneath the earth skin of this vast organism. I touched the outreaching roots of the trees... I could feel that nearly invisible network of capillary roots... I breathed in and out. I was part of the forest. I was alive.

The wind is blowing hard around me, the sound is rising in my chest again, and I feel I can fly.And then the branch has shifted under my feet, the deep furrows of the bark have left my back, and I have no time to spread my arms. I am not flying. I am falling.

I watched water dripping off the ferns and the needles of the Western Red Cedar next door. I watched it running in runnels down the bark of the Cherry tree, and I looked at the small droplets of misty water that were accumulating on the broad leaves of the Bigleaf Maple.I touched one of the accumulated droplets, and instantly it was gone.

Many people think trees grow so big from soil and water, but this is not true. Trees get their mass from the air. They gobble up airborne carbon dioxide and perform an act of chemical fission by using the energy from sunshine... Essentially, trees are made of air and sunshine.

I fall for centuries of life. First sunlight touches this hillside; and buried inside the earth, a seed stirs, turning slowly in the deep soil like a tadpole turning itself in a dank pool.

A rising tower of wood and needles and branches and great slabs of bark that has grown for hundreds of years. An impossible castle made from air and sunlight, fixed in place by the power of photosynthesis and chlorophyll. Magic. With lights.