The Wood has Ears
Saturday, July 4th, 2009 by lunaman“Quiet!” warned Adam. “The wood has ears, the field has eyes, and the forester has three young archers who serve the king and guard the deer day and night and have a lodge high upon a hill.”
from King Edward and the Shepherd, medieval manuscript, c.1300
That field hath eyen, and the wood hath ears.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Knightes Tale. Line 1524.
Becomes John Heywood’s, Proverbes Part II, c.V of 1565
Fieldes have eies and woods have eares
From Herman Hesse’s Wanderings
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts. Trees have long thoughts, long breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
Wandering : Notes and Sketches / translated by James Wright. – New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972