And yet I love this tree and I worry that one day my neighbors will ask that I trim its branches. I will have a difficult decision to make: do I preserve a measure of affable cordiality or do I become the villain of the piece? Let us hope that day never comes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I have such strong feelings for a single birch tree, imagine how a forest full of Redwood trees, massive and majestic, affects me. Having had a few conversations about them it is evident that the Redwood evokes widely different emotions in different people, with one friend even implying that they are sinister. I do understand the thought as their forests are typically dark and cool, sunlight struggling to filter through their canopies far above, and their trunks often gnarled by age and circumstance. But that’s not how I think of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But what do <\/em>I think of them? Perhaps I am writing this piece too soon as I still struggle to describe how they made me feel. They evoke a sense of awe and wonder, mostly because of their size, but there is nothing particularly striking or beautiful about them when compared to some other trees. In some ways they are archetypical – ask a child to draw a tree and it will look very similar to a Redwood. But they just feel ancient, they feel aloof, they feel like they experience time in a completely different scale and do not even notice us. I have used the word majesty but I don\u2019t think they are even that regal. Instead they are like residents of a separate world, a spirit world, a world beyond our ken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the course of a few days I had the privilege of experiencing these trees in many different ways: sharing the experience with larger crowds in kid-friendly trails, walking in solitude for hours, spending meditative moments in groves, and driving through highways and byways wending their way through forests. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The highlight was a ten-mile loop in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, where for the first four miles I encountered not a single other soul as I traipsed up and down valleys and through groves. The trail hit the sea at its halfway point, its brine noticeable in the air, hitting the senses well before even the sounds of the crashing waves, the water mostly invisible because of a heavy fog blanketing the shore. A short detour through a canyon of ferns was not as enjoyable, oddly enough not because of the hordes of children gleefully playing in small pools but instead clueless older humans who have no concept of trail etiquette. I returned to the forest for the final four miles, which, admittedly, was a major challenge for my aching legs. Exhausting as it was, it was a delight for the soul and for the senses, one of the best hikes I\u2019ve ever done. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This was my final adventure before heading to San Francisco for the rest of my trip and these trees inevitably led me to think of the tension we have with our natural world. We need its resources so we can survive but as any half-way discerning and intelligent person knows there is no balance. In my journeys, I traveled through many forests, dense and green, but also sources for logging and trucks heavily laden with felled trees slowly chugging along country highways, trees whose great heights will not return for many lifetimes yet. It makes me wonder about one of my favorite hobbies, woodworking (see my work here<\/a>), and if I should be considering it at all in moral terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My experiences in these travels, as is ever the case whenever I have the good fortune of visiting the great parks and lands of our nation, have also given me great appreciation for the people and organizations that work to conserve and protect them. The job of a ranger is a noble one and that of a conservationist an important one, channeling the connection that indigenous peoples once had and still have to the land, reminding us that the earth is a mother and a father, a shelter and a home, who punishes with cruelty but also provides without prejudice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It has been well established that my soul age is 21. This to be clear is not my own judgment but the determination of others. A recent tarot reading also supports the idea of the youthfulness of my spirit – albeit in an abstruse and mystical manner. I don\u2019t think it was always this way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dorukakan.com\/doruk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dorukakan.com\/doruk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dorukakan.com\/doruk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dorukakan.com\/doruk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dorukakan.com\/doruk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=905"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dorukakan.com\/doruk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":967,"href":"https:\/\/dorukakan.com\/doruk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905\/revisions\/967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dorukakan.com\/doruk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dorukakan.com\/doruk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dorukakan.com\/doruk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dorukakan.com\/doruk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/20260528_113824-768x1024.jpg\")
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