A Forest and What’s Real

I’m in the forest.

I’m standing alone in the redwoods of Marin County. The trees are impossibly tall, a description that feels both lazy and precise.

They are as grand as they are majestic, as towering as they are brutish, and quietly elegant as they are rooted in the heart of this here jungle.

Language fails here. Superlatives like "immense, ancient, stately, mysterious, powerful" abound, yet they are mere linguistic scaffolding for an experience that defies easy assimilation.¹ From a seed no larger than a tomato's, the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) can ascend to heights of over 367 feet, the equivalent of a 35-story skyscraper, a scale designed to arouse humility.¹ The air is damp, ancient, rich with the smell of loam and pine. It carries the distinct, earthy scent of terpenes, chemical compounds the trees release to ward off insects and protect themselves from fire—a form of silent, organic communication.² Something stirs in the high canopy, a rustle of branches. Something scampers in the undergrowth below.

It’s breathing.

And in that quiet moment, you may also wonder if it’s real.

This place is a kind of cathedral, a descriptor often used by visitors overwhelmed by the sense of awe these groves evoke.² The enclosed canopy filters the sunlight into a diffuse, calming glow, bathing the forest floor in a light that feels both sacred and primordial.² But unlike a cathedral built by human hands, this one is indifferent. It is eternal, uncaring, and beautiful in its absolute lack of concern for its observer. Its existence, stretching back 20 million years in this region, speaks not in words but in a "soft-toned voice of patience and endurance".¹ This feeling of standing before something vast and incomprehensible is the essence of the sublime, a philosophical concept that attempts to articulate the boundary of human experience. The Irish philosopher Edmund Burke identified the sublime as an experience rooted in "whatever is in any sort terrible," a feeling that excites ideas of pain and danger and produces "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling".³ It is a state of "astonishment" mixed with "some degree of horror," a passion tied to the primal instinct of self-preservation.³ The latent terror in the forest—the unseen movement, the sheer, crushing scale of the trees—is not merely atmospheric; it is the trigger for thi...

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