Ned Hayes Quotes & Sayings

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

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

In the end, I listen to my fear. It keeps me awake, resounding through the frantic beating in my breast. It is there in the dry terror in my throat, in the pricking of the rats' nervous feet in the darkness. Christian has not come home all the night long. I know, for I have lain in this darkness for hours now with my eyes stretched wide, yearning for my son's return. — Ned Hayes

Maybe it is possible to make new things out of the broken things. I — Ned Hayes

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

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

I reached down to feel the soil, and I touched the outreaching roots of the trees that bore horizontally and vertically hundreds of feet through the forest. I stroked the earth with my palm, and I could almost feel that invisible network of capillary roots that sucks moisture and nutrients out of every inch of the soil I was standing on. I breathed in and out. I was part of the forest. I was alive. — Ned Hayes

The strength of the trees around me became a tide carrying me ceaselessly forward. — Ned Hayes

April comes to us, with her showers sweet. I wake to the cries of little birds before the light comes across the heath. They wait all night with open eyes. Now, with the rain at dawn, their voices make melody.
I turn back the reveled cloth of gold on my bed and walk to gaze beyond my glazed casement window. In the plaintive voices of the wood fowl, I imagine my mother calling to me, her words echoing across the years. — Ned Hayes

I do not believe in anything that I cannot see with my own eyes or hear with my own ears. — Ned Hayes

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

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

Every night, I slip into the empty winter land of memory. — Ned Hayes

At the center of any tree is the great pillar of the central trunk ... It's like building a cathedral by applying paint every week and waiting for it to dry before applying the next paint-thin layer of living material. Each angelic layer is applied, in times of drought and times of moisture alike. The tree simply keeps growing, higher and higher, expanding its territory, pushing out new growth. — Ned Hayes

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

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

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

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

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

Most of the trees are already dying. All across North America from Mexico to Alaska, forests are dying. Seventy thousand square miles of forest - that's as much land as all of the state of Washington - that much forest has died since I was born. What if I am growing up in a world that will not have trees anymore by the time I am my grandfather's age? — Ned Hayes

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

Stars flicker above, points of bright ice in a dark river. I pull a heavy sheepskin around my legs and stretch my feet toward the fire. Despite the cold, Liam plays his flute, the sound whistling through the night. Soon my eyes are heavy, my head nodding.I open my eyes at the deep melodious baritone of Salvius's voice telling a tale. Liam's flute is silent now. I have heard Salvius tell many tales on market days; he is known for his memory of wandering minstrels and mummers who visit us at Whitsunday and through Midsummer. Salvius is a mockingbird: he can give a fair charade of the rhythmic tones of any wandering bard or any noble of the Royal Court.In this darkness, his eyes catch the light like a cat in the night. — Ned Hayes

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

The good, the bad, the virgin, and the harlot: no one is spared, all go rose-spattered with plague lesions. I see no sense, no judgment before doom strikes. Death takes us all with the black malady or the sweating sickness, or the white blindness or the winter croup, or the crops failing or bitter water in our mouths. — Ned Hayes

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

Under the sanctuary are the catacombs where the dead wait for resurrection. The living do not venture there. The caverns here underneath the Sanctuary are illuminated only by dim shafts of light from the sanctuary. The walls are etched with flowers of frost, but at least I am out of the wind. Dark bays line the hall in front of me, a vast rabbit warren, each hold filled to the brim with the scent of the past. — Ned Hayes

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

Rooks have clustered on either side of the long road. It is as if they line a grand parade route for our passage. Their black feathers are stark as soot against the white road and the snow. They stab at the ground with their strange bare bills and gray unfeathered faces. The birds are like rough-edged black stones on a string around this stripped cold neck of road. The old books tell us rooks bring the virtuous dead to heaven's gate. — Ned Hayes

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

We are but a tattered remnant, a small and bastard race who linger on the shoulders of that giant race, a memory that is always our better. We look backward always, scratching in the ruins, reclaiming scraps from their vast and long-abandoned table of knowledge. For we are misshapen offspring, stunted in our ways and our minds, reaching blindly after the treasures of knowledge lost to time. — Ned Hayes

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

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

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

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

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

God's power shines through everything we see, but it is no more evident than when we see the shining steadfastness of a tree that is hundreds of years old. I look up at the great arching branches of a tree like the Eagle Tree, found in the old-growth LBA Woods, and I think that is what it feels like to be embraced by the everlasting. — Ned Hayes

I am like a bird buried deep in a dark forest of possibility and finding their way by echolocation. — Ned Hayes

I felt the bark of the trees on either side of me as I walked. It was very soothing. Here in the LBA Woods, the trees grew very close together and when I did not walk on the path, I would reach out with my fingertips and touch their bark as I passed. The skin of the trees was warm in the sunlight, and rough, and I imagined that each tree contained a soul. Like an Ent. I knew this idea was not a true thing, but still I felt good that the trees were here. — Ned Hayes

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

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

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

Time moves on, and with it all flesh. — Ned Hayes

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

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

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

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

I walk into the night forest. I reach out my hands on either side. I can feel the smooth bark of the Red Alder trees and the rough chasms of mature Douglas Fir, and then I can feel the stringy fibrous bark of the Western Red Cedar. I can push my fingers into the Cedar bark; it is like cloth to my fingertips. But here and there I can also feel the lacelike fingers of Hemlock and the prickly needles of Spruce touching my face and my neck. — Ned Hayes

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

We are part of a system that includes trees. Without trees, we will eventually all — Ned Hayes

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

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

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

Trees are a miracle in themselves; they do not require God to be miraculous. — Ned Hayes

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

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

I watched water dripping off the ferns and the needles of the Western Red Cedar next door. I watched it running in runnels down the bark of the Cherry tree, and I looked at the small droplets of misty water that were accumulating on the broad leaves of the Bigleaf Maple.I touched one of the accumulated droplets, and instantly it was gone. — Ned Hayes

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

I do not like this idea that we have begun to kill off - at great velocity and accelerating speed - all of the things that sustain us. I didn't like it at all when I first thought of it, but most people around me do not seem that disturbed by it, even though the knowledge of this is obvious and readily available to anyone who looks up trees on the Internet. At least, no one seems bothered, because no one has taken action to amend it. So they must not care. That is the only explanation I can think of for the lack of reaction to this fact. — Ned Hayes

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

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

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

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

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