But a tree has been my father and my preceptor.
For often when I was a child
A black and bitter humor overwhelmed me,
Making all company hateful, the air breathed by others a poison,
So that I fled into solitude there to obscurely nourish this grief that I felt unfolding itself within me.
And there I met this tree,
Like some primordial man, surviving antiquity,
And I embraced it, clasping its trunk in my arms.
For it was there before I was born and will be there when we are here no longer,
And the measure of its time is not the same as ours.