Trees are the great teachers of patience, and the older they are the better the lesson. An oak I walk past most days has been there perhaps two hundred years — long enough that every season I have ever seen is, to it, a small weather in the long weather of its life.

I find I have to stand quite still under it before anything begins to speak. That is the first lesson: stillness is not the absence of activity but a different kind of activity, the kind that happens when you stop moving long enough to notice what is already being done.