Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life

Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life
ISBN 0-932776-01-9
66 pages, $7.50

Deeply refreshing, this poetic essay explores our human relationship to nature in all its nuances and depths. Again and again, Steffen shows how the child’s intimate connection with nature can be regained by adults who find the enlivening forces of resurrection within themselves.

If you feel melancholy and dejected, you need only look at the sky, and as soon as you conceive this immensity again, the primal force within the soul reappears.... I love to look upon the meadows, lakes, and arabesques of the trees, but I always return to the blue of the sky because that is the most blessed for my eyes.... Do you realize that the harmony which streams out from the azure can be cultivated by drinking in this blue, by giving yourself up to it alone, and turning away from everything else? “Today, I have not taken in enough blue,” you could say, if you wanted to test in some measure the impatience and lack of concentration within you; and in order to be freed from these disturbing influences you need only gaze upwards for awhile.
Albert Steffen,
Pilgrimage to the Tree of Life