Some of these trees are thousands of years old. Can you imagine? To be a sequoia in an old-growth forest, let to live and live and live and keep on living. Let to reach so far toward the sky, lesser beings can hardly see the top of you. And as your body grows, you become a home: termites and weevils, owls tending to their downy young, webbed pouches of hatching moths, squirrels fattening in a hollowed branch. Your body, a city. Your body, sustaining and feeding and sheltering so many—and all the while, you never have to die. You never have to kill.
