When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world,
but walk slowly, and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”
photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, October 10, 2025, “Among the trees in my yard”
I’m always delighted to walk under the Gingko trees in Mountain View Cemetery near our house in Oakland. The branches are full and leaf out over the sidewalk as we pass under them, the shade protecting us from the afternoon sun here in Oakland. And gingko trees hold special memories for me.
When I was a student at Washington High School in Milwaukee, an English teacher gave us the assignment of finding the gingko trees in Sherman Park, a few blocks to the north of the high school, along Burleigh Street. And so I took a walk through the park, looking upward into the trees and finding the ginkgo trees, collecting a few leaves to take with me to complete the assignment.
The upper flat we lived in during my high school years was on North 49 Street, in the block south of Burleigh, and so those trees stood only a few blocks to the east of where my family lived. Many times, I walked through the streets from Center to Burleigh, stamping through the leaves on autumn days, or quickening my pace during the winter as I skirted around icy places on the cement.
The streets were beautiful then, the branches of elm trees and a few maples meeting overhead and over the road, lush green in the summer and bright orange and red in the autumn.
Sometimes, I like to walk along those streets in my memory. They formed an audience to the person I was becoming. And those streets marked the edges of what I knew, even in the years after I stood in a doorway of our flat, looked out into the street, and said aloud: “I don’t belong here.”
I didn’t know it then, but my path would take me far away from those narrow streets, those crowded flats. I didn’t know it then, but I would live for many years in northern California, for many more years than I walked home from school under the trees whose branches covered me, followed me home.
Gingko leaf, from a tree in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland photo by meb, 9/2025
We trek to a place of solitude, this lonely place, to sit, to listen to the water, to the wind, to the silence: the silence speaks to us as we walk, as we sit.
And in this lonely place the loneliness drains from us – from our arms, our legs, our beating hearts – richness fills us: the voices of the pines, the balsam, and the birch which call out to us in the wind. Gentle, the breeze ruffles the needles, the leaves.
We have searched – endlessly – for this place: for the solitude that is in loneliness, for the depth that is boundless, without form.
Here, the emptiness fills us, completes us.
—Mary Elyn Bahlert, “At Solitude Swale,” Door County, Wisconsin, 5/2025
At Solitude Swale, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, May 25, 2025
I hold my hand into the night and words drop – light – into my palm: blessed words, delivered from the heart of the ancestors – before them – from the hearts of others – all who worked and walked and wondered as we do now. I hold my hand into the night and words drop – light – into my open palm. —Mary Elyn Bahlert, 5/2025
Where words drop from the sky – The Ridges, Baileys Harbor, WI photo by meb, 5/2025
