"This thing is growing strong", he thought. "I began it because it comforted me when my father was dead, and not it is grown so strong that it overtops nearly everything. And still it comforts me."
After Elizabeth told Joseph that she is pregnant he went to the old oak tree to tell it the news. The tree, in a way, replaced Joseph's father and it became a source of comfort at first. As the time went on, and Joseph realized this now, the tree became more than just a place of comfort for him-the tree became the heart of his land and it ruled Joseph's decisions. The tree became more important than anything else and the fact that Joseph himself felt it right to give the tree this meaning doesn't lessen its importance.
"This is the storm," he thought. "This is the beginning of the thing I knew. There is some cycle here, steady and quick and unchangeable as a fly-wheel." And the tired thought came to him that if he gazed into the pool and cleaned his mind of every cluttering picture he might come to know the cycle.
The old oak tree is dead, the land is beginning to die and now Elizabeth is dead too. When he first came to the valley of Our Lady Joseph was warned by the workers that the land was left unoccupied before him because there was a devastating drought that had dreadful consequences on the previous inhabitants. Now Joseph feels the storm as he calls this, he feels the ending days of his land-ownership approaching. His cycle is coming to an end and there is nothing he can do about it.
And he thought, "It's a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man's life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back towards stillness."
Joseph finally gets back home after Elizabeth died. He sees the evidence of Elizabeth's life around the house: the clock that she wound up is still ticking and the socks that she hung are still damp. It makes him ponder the death of a person as a slow process where the person is not dead until the very last evidence or wave of life is gone.
