This photo was taken last fall in the Rarău Mountains in eastern Romania. Florin Floriol was our tour guide on a trip to Romania’s Bukovina Region.

“Let’s engage in the spirit of the forest,” Florin said to Rebecca just before I took this picture.

As my index finger tapped my phone’s photo button, I recall thinking how humbling it is to imagine the natural world has something to teach us. That it has a spirit.

I read somewhere that prayer ought to be for our sake and not for Gods’. Bowing, kneeling, or prostrating are physical manifestations of reverence for something transcendent.

Listening to a tree is a prayer. It’s also a powerful exercise in something else many of us have lost, a sense of awe.

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An overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful.

Dictionary.com

Awe described my feeling on Monday, when I came upon this sight.

On Sunday, a storm with 65 mph winds pummeled northeast Iowa. No human lives lost but cars overturned and hundreds of trees downed, including this tree at one of the entrances to the Trout Run Trail, three blocks from our home.

You can see my bike just to the right of the woman in yellow.

As I entered the trail, I thought what on earth am I looking at? I dismounted and gawked. Is a chimera just over the embankment dam? And then another damn:

I’d never seen such a big tree torn from its centuries-old home.

I marveled at the size of its roots.

Was this tree planted by the Ho-Chunks who had a village on this land in 1840? Or by the Day family, European-Americans who settled Decorah in 1849, 100 years before I was born.

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You were one of the longest-living beings on earth

I know you only in death

You cannot be replaced

I will honor you with a descendent

So you will not be forgotten