Ned Hayes Quotes

#1. I must learn to be as the bear in a cage with the stick that pokes it always, through the bars. The bear acts as if the stick is made of air, and takes no notice of it, even when it is sharpened and draws blood. I must do the same.

Ned Hayes

#2. The strength of the trees around me became a tide carrying me ceaselessly forward.

Ned Hayes

#3. Each tree hears signals from an unseen internal time system ... perhaps even from the stars ... Then the tree renews its conquest of the air every spring.

Ned Hayes

#4. I know these trees by their feel and their scent. I don't have to turn on my light to know them. The wind blows through the trees. The leaves and needles shake. Almost I feel the wind is sweeping through me as well.

Ned Hayes

#5. Time can be difficult for me. It is a continuous thing, and it has no boundaries. Sometimes it moves very fast and sometimes very slow.

Ned Hayes

#6. After I completed the tree climb in the damp mist, my hands were covered with a muddy residue of bark and rainwater, and I was exhausted. But I was very happy.

Ned Hayes

#7. Any story is an ocean whose tide begins in a place I can't know, and my life is but a moment in that flood, my part in it only a mote in the flow.

Ned Hayes

#8. 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.

Ned Hayes

#9. I do not believe in anything that I cannot see with my own eyes or hear with my own ears.

Ned Hayes

#10. Trees do not require you to make certain sounds to be understood. They are simply present and ready for you to climb at any time. Trees are easier.

Ned Hayes

#11. The people protesting to save these woods are right - these trees are almost untouched. His voice was different somehow. It was exactly the sound in his voice that I heard at the funeral of my great-uncle.

Ned Hayes

#12. The branches are a storm around me, and I fall into a deep well of green. The needles and limbs rush past. It is a whirling motion of green and brown branches.

Ned Hayes

#13. 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.

Ned Hayes

#14. Time moves on, and with it all flesh.

Ned Hayes

#15. I saw the Eagle Tree for the first time on the third Monday of the month of March, which I guess could be considered auspicious if I believed in magic or superstition or religion ...

Ned Hayes

#16. This bird looks at me with obsidian eyes. They glimmer, small black lights in the gloom. I do not blink.

Ned Hayes

#17. I cannot see in the dark like the Northern flying squirrel - Glaucomys sabrinus - who lives in the trees of the Pacific Northwest and is strictly nocturnal. So I take a flashlight.

Ned Hayes

#18. I remember the fire, it burns bright, always around me. I close my eyes, and tears stream out. The tides of the past seize me, bear me out to sea.

Ned Hayes

#19. Speech does not always unravel matters. Words can betray you, their labyrinthine threads tangled in knots, for we were cursed at that great tower of Babel, to speak always in riddles and never yet to comprehend.

Ned Hayes

#20. I believe that God's glory comes to us through many things, through almost everything, because matter itself is a thin veil over God's rich glory spilling through, like light through every crack.

Ned Hayes

#21. My fingers are callused from gripping tree limbs, and my nails are short and grubby with bark. They are like the talons of a bird that lives only in trees.

Ned Hayes

#22. Every night, I slip into the empty winter land of memory.

Ned Hayes

#23. 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.

Ned Hayes

#24. Already, the Elms and the Chestnuts are gone, and the Hemlocks and the Flowering Dogwoods. And I didn't get a chance to climb them yet.

Ned Hayes

#25. A tree is a vast thing full of heavy mass. But that mass is mostly inert. The real life of the tree happens in three very thin layers - the phloem, xylem, and cambium. These thin layers are just beneath the bark and they are the envelope of life around the heartwood at the center of the tree.

Ned Hayes

#26. After I read David Suzuki's book, I took salmon from my dinner plate and I buried it in the woods, hoping to assist the growth of a large tree.

Ned Hayes

#27. 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.

Ned Hayes

#28. It is a kingship grand that all of us build, every day of our meager lives, and it is a castle made of sand. Every wrong righted seems to bring another misdeed tumbling down upon our heads. But I for one will keep building such a kingdom.

Ned Hayes

#29. When I fall from the tree, every future climbing move explodes apart in my mind, a deck of cards thrown in the air.

Ned Hayes

#30. At forty feet, the sky is entirely black, but now starlight bleeds faintly down into the forest from between rushing gray clouds.

Ned Hayes

#31. Every moment with your child is precious, no matter how long they live, no matter the number of their days.

Ned Hayes

#32. Maybe it is possible to make new things out of the broken things. I

Ned Hayes

#33. I was still looking at the floor of the forest, and I was seeing again the pattern of the leaves moving across the light in the sky, and across my skin.

Ned Hayes

#34. I am a tree in the forest, moving very slowly, only barely touched by the wind. Everyone else just moves past me, and I watch them go, because I cannot be moved from who I am.

Ned Hayes

#35. Western Red Cedar bark and cones are distinct. The foliage is not coniferous ... the tree has flat intricate fronds that branch out like lace. It droops down, hanging fingers from each branch. In certain lights, it looks like a tree made of ferns.

Ned Hayes

#36. I am like a tree that looks dead to the world, but when you climb to the very top, you find bright green limbs sucking sap one hundred feet from the ground. And you discover the tree is very much alive, and is keeping its secret of life from the world.

Ned Hayes

#37. I am like a bird buried deep in a dark forest of possibility and finding their way by echolocation.

Ned Hayes

#38. The light filtered through the trees, rays of sunlight splitting around the vast trunks, the branches above us fluttering in a faint wind, and the green needles of Douglas Firs shimmering silver underneath in the breeze.

Ned Hayes

#39. We are part of a system that includes trees. Without trees, we will eventually all

Ned Hayes

#40. 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.

Ned Hayes

#41. 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.

Ned Hayes

#42. The wheel of Fortune turns one way and another, taking us to the heights or the depths. That is the great wheel on which we all turn, tied to destinies that move up or down at the whim of God above.

Ned Hayes

#43. I am especially interested in shadows and light that are changed by branches or leaves. So that is mostly what I watch when I am up in the trees. I watch the shadows, I watch the lights, and I watch the leaves move in the wind. On

Ned Hayes

#44. I believe in trees. I can touch them. And they have true names. They do not change in terms of what they are to me.

Ned Hayes

#45. Trees are a miracle in themselves; they do not require God to be miraculous.

Ned Hayes

#46. I can see no greater sign of God's glory than the trees around us in the Pacific Northwest. All you have to do is look outside to see God - there are trees everywhere.

Ned Hayes

#47. This tree was a vast cylinder of wood. It filled the sky. The limbs reached out above me, a great canopy sheltering the rest of the trees, as if they were its children.

Ned Hayes

#48. I could tell that we were in the midst of many trees ... this fact was like the water running endlessly ... It was a deep current beneath the surface of a stream.

Ned Hayes