Last Sunday afternoon, I was driving home from the grocery store. It was twilight after a rain, and I had been thinking about our daughter Lauren all day. She was deeply in my heart. Perhaps I had dreamed about her the night before, or perhaps grief had brought her near again. But on that drive, something happened that I will never forget.

Last Sunday afternoon, I was driving home from the grocery store. It was twilight after a rain, and I had been thinking about our daughter Lauren all day. She was deeply in my heart. Perhaps I had dreamed about her the night before, or perhaps grief had brought her near again. But on that drive, something happened that I will never forget.

I sit in the silence of my backyard this morning. The stillness is broken only by the cheerful chatter of birds and the rustling of squirrels. In this quiet, I look out at the trees.

Lark and I lived in the small town of Concord, Massachusetts when I did my internship in Boston. We rented a little Cape Cod cottage surrounded by tall trees, just one block off the town center.

When I was a little boy, the huge oak at the bottom of our yard was a fascination as well as mystery. It held a place of significance. Something happened there one summer day that I have never forgotten.

For depth psychologist Carl Jung, the tree was a powerful image of the Self and of the soul’s long journey toward wholeness. He noticed that people often included trees in their mandalas and in other spontaneous images they created. To him, this suggested something important: the psyche was trying to gather its many scattered parts into one living whole.

In recent years, scientists and naturalists have begun looking more deeply into the lives of trees. How they grow, communicate, support one another, bear fruit, host countless forms of life, and eventually die. Why this growing fascination with trees?