Today is April 25th, and on this day in history, communities across America gather with shovels in hand and saplings at the ready, celebrating National Arbor Day. Born in the Nebraska plains of 1872, when J. Sterling Morton championed the planting of one million trees in a single day, this humble celebration of cultivation continues to return each spring like an old friend.
I was thinking about trees this morning. About how we share this world with beings who measure time so differently than we do. While we hurry through hours and days, trees stand witness to decades and centuries. A sapling planted on the first Arbor Day might still be standing today, its rings of growth containing the silent history of 153 years of rainfall, drought, cold winters, and warm summers.
There’s something profoundly hopeful about planting a tree. It’s an act of patience, of faith in a future you might not personally witness. The ancient Greek proverb says, “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.” When we dig into soil and nestle roots into the earth, we’re casting a vote for tomorrow’s world.
I wonder about the hands that planted the oak outside my window. Were they calloused from hard work? Did they belong to someone who loved this land? Did they imagine someone like me would someday appreciate their effort? The tree doesn’t remember, but it carries their intention forward nonetheless.
Trees don’t judge the worthiness of those who rest beneath their branches. They offer shade to saints and sinners alike. They convert our exhaled carbon dioxide to oxygen without asking about our politics or checking our credentials. In an age of division, there’s wisdom in their indiscriminate generosity.
Our human history is marked by both creation and destruction. We build monuments that crumble, wage wars that devastate, and create art that inspires. But simple tree-planting might be among our most enduring legacies. Those first Nebraska settlers understood something essential about belonging to a place – that to truly call somewhere home means to invest in its future.
I think about all the small ceremonies happening today: a child patting soil around a young dogwood, a community gathering to restore a forest, a family planting a memorial tree for a loved one passed. Each of these acts connects us to cycles larger than ourselves.
Perhaps that’s what Arbor Day offers us – a gentle reminder that we exist in the middle of stories that began long before us and will continue long after we’re gone. And for one day at least, we acknowledge our role as both inheritors and ancestors, receiving abundance from the past and offering possibility to the future.
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