I’m not going to bullshit you about some mystical awakening or whatever the fuck people claim happens when they see big trees. But laying there on a bed of redwood needles looking up at five month old Charlie, this tiny perfect human who somehow shares my DNA, held by Lindsey in that cathedral of redwoods? Yeah. That does something to me.
These trees were here before Columbus was a mistake, before the railroad cut through, before anyone thought to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. They’ve outlasted empires, wars, countless human dramas that seemed so goddamn important at the time. And here’s this kid, brand new, knowing absolutely nothing about how hard everything is about to be, how beautiful and terrible and confusing life gets.
Whatever cosmic dice roll landed me here, with this woman who somehow tolerates my shit, holding our son under trees that have seen everything and judged nothing, it’s obscene good fortune. I’ve burned through way too many chances like matches, and yet here I am.
Seneca wrote about these groves striking you with the presence of deity. I’m not much for gods, but I get it. There’s something about scale, temporal and physical, that puts your insignificant ass in perspective. Charlie doesn’t know he’s lucky yet. He doesn’t know these trees are ancient or that his mother is beautiful or that his father is a deeply flawed man having an unearned moment of grace.
But I know. Laying there on my back, I knew. The luckiest thing isn’t the trees or even the moment itself. It’s that somewhere along the line, despite everything, I got to be here. To witness this. To be part of something bigger than my own stupid noise.
How lucky am I?
Impossibly, inexplicably, undeservedly lucky.
When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?
Seneca the Elder