Stand Still and be Constantly Changing

My high school English teacher gave me the gift of poetry, that above all other lessons has remained with me. Our senior year she tucked into a white envelope a poem that was "ours" as a gift of what she had known of us in the last year. I have no idea what my friends got, and maybe we all got the same poem. I am certain as a teacher now, that there was a standard number of poems recycled every year, but her magical felt that was a lie. Her magic felt that the poem was penned for me. It is a gift I treasured then and have revisited often over the last few decades.

Trees by Howard Nemerov

To be a giant and keep quiet about it,

To stay in one's own place;

To stand for the constant presence of process

And always to seem the same;

To be steady as a rock and always trembling,

Having the hard appearance of death

With the soft, fluent nature of growth,

One's Being deceptively armored,

One's Becoming deceptively vulnerable;

To be so tough, and take the light so well,

Freely providing forbidden knowledge

Of so many things about heaven and earth

For which we should otherwise have no word—

Poems or people are rarely so lovely,

And even when they have great qualities

They tend to tell you rather than exemplify

What they believe themselves to be about,

While from the moving silence of trees,

Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,

Night or day, we draw conclusions of our own,

Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath,

And perilous also—though there has never been

A critical tree—about the nature of things.

It is a gift. It is still a gift to me.

Trees symbolize permanence while also embodying change. To be so tough and take the light so well...

They tend to tell you rather exemplify.

All this many years later it feels so nice to be seen. I think what the best teachers do is reflect the image of our students to themselves. The greatest compliment I was ever paid was when a student said to a room full of other students that she will tell you you are great until you believe it.

Trees