There was a hermit who had lived five hundred years in a Redwood tree in a far and lonely forest. Over the centuries he had learned to absorb water from the coastal fogs of summer, the rains of winter. He had learned to live on a diet of insects and occasionally the inner bark from Redwood branches. In return his feces and urine fell to the base of the tree and the rain washed nutrients from them to the roots. Every morning the hermit would climb to the top of the tree and he would look out at the world and marvel at the beauty that surrounded him. He would thank the gods for the earth then he would return to his perch lower in the tree and he would compose himself for a day of meditation. His aim had been to achieve oneness with the gods. It occurred to him that there was a certain arrogance to this effort, but he had set out on this undertaking in his youth. Now all he really wanted was to abandon his concern for himself and become one with the great emptiness which he suspected was really all there was to it. And so the hermit sat all day filling himself with emptiness.
He did not become aware of the woman all at once. She seeped into his consciousness over a number of months, but once she was there he found it impossible to achieve an empty mind. Her tree was perhaps fifty yards from his. All day she fussed. Talked into a small box she held. Listened to sounds that came from the box. Fussed with the covers she had brought with her - let a bucket down on a rope and pulled it up again. Laughed in the day. Cried at night. Impossible.
Then one day she called to him. He did not understand of course, but over the months he thought he got a meaning from her. There were men who wanted to cut down the great trees. The woman wanted to stop them.
``We must save the Redwoods!'' she said.
The hermit thought about this. It seemed to him that the Redwood tree was all that tied him to the earth. Without the tree perhaps he could achieve absolute emptiness and wasn't that what he wanted? Yes.
After a year the girl left her tree. He was alone once more. No one came to take down his tree so he composed himself for another five hundred years in search of oneness, fighting every day the beauty of the earth.