Old-growth groves compel a reverent silence in human visitors

Evidence

Fluted trunks rise from a lawn of deep moss-green, their canopies lost in the hanging mist that suffuses the forest with hazy silver twilight. Strewn with huge logs and clumps of ferns, the forest floor is a featherbed of needles dappled with sun flecks. Light streams through holes over the heads of young trees while their grandmothers loom in shadows, great buttressed trunks eight feet in diameter. You want to be quiet in instinctive deference to the cathedral hush and because nothing you could possibly say would add a thing. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1015

Categorization

• XREF: The cathedral-hush effect parallels ch. 53 readiness/quietness and the Soundscape thread on silence as presence.