Life & Wisdom Quote by Hal Borland

Borland pulls off a quiet flex: he treats the natural world not as scenery but as a moral instructor, and in doing so side-steps the usual self-help bluster. “Knowing trees” is a deliberately slow verb. You don’t “know” a tree the way you know a fact; you know it by watching seasons pass, by noticing how growth hides inside stillness. Patience, here, isn’t saintly calm. It’s the acceptance that meaningful change often looks like nothing at all until it suddenly doesn’t.

Then he lowers the camera to ground level. Grass is the anti-hero of the landscape: ignored, stepped on, mowed down, always returning. “Persistence” gets stripped of its motivational-poster shine and recast as something almost stubbornly ordinary. Trees are aspiration and time; grass is pressure and repetition. One teaches endurance through longevity, the other through refusal.

The subtext is a critique of human pacing. Modern life prizes visible progress, quantified effort, quick transformation. Borland’s line suggests that our frustration isn’t just impatience; it’s a mismatch between our expectations and the tempos that actually govern living systems. Coming from a mid-century American nature writer, it also fits a broader cultural moment when conservation and “back to the land” sensibilities framed nature as both refuge and corrective to industrial acceleration.

The intent isn’t to romanticize the outdoors. It’s to smuggle in a philosophy of time: wait like a tree, return like grass.