Spirit and Conscience

On the first day of winter, a week before the first snow, I went for a walk at the Lake of the Isles. The wind was fierce and the light unearthly. Across the lake was a row of trees whose leaves had turned yellow. The clouds were moving fast and kept covering and uncovering the sun at a rapid pace. Whenever the sun was uncovered, the yellow trees glowed with a bright golden light, almost like they’d been switched on electrically. When the clouds took over, the trees turned dull, drab and indistinctly tinted. Back and forth, back and forth. What a show. I only got to see it because I was looking. That was when I became aware how much I had been noticing trees over the past year. It was as though there had been a sign in front of me: “Start Seeing Trees”! I realized I’d been taking pictures of them for months.

I learned that trees, unlike most other living things, don’t stop growing as long as they live. I concluded that I must feel a special connection to them because, metaphorically, that’s what I would like to do as well.

This column is usually about a person or a group of people who are doing something extraordinary (in my opinion) to make the world a better place. This time I wanted to honor the trees for their contribution, not in a sentimental or romantic way, but in a “mindful” way. (My computer says mindful is not a word, but when I hear the Buddhists use it, I know it’s a word.) It’s not like trees get together and say, “Oh, let’s help the human beings.” My friend Bruce, who’s a tree farmer and a poet, says it’s not that simplistic—they are part of the web of life just as we are and all other living things are. We are all of equal importance.

What is the relationship between humans and trees? I don’t know what we are to them —hopefully they pray for us day and night—but to us they are gentle giants, vulnerable by virtue of their immobility. I think we first of all value them for their obvious beauty, and are moved by it. Then we think of what trees are good for—from fruits and nuts to lumber to oxygen to fuel to cellulose products such as rayon, cellophane or ice cream thickeners, to lignin used in highway blacktops or vanilla flavoring, to living art exhibits such as the palm trees at the sculpture garden. Next, we think of the big ecological picture—the balance of nature. Lastly (maybe), we wonder how much or little we should do to help trees live and grow.

Once I decided to write about trees, my first thought was, naturally, to interview a tree. My friend Lee said that’s not so strange. She told me to get a book from the library called “The Healing Wisdom of Africa” by Malidoma Some’. This West African mentor writes that “trees are our guardians, commissioned by our Mother the earth to provide safety and comfort as we travel through life.” He tells of a ritual in which a group of people go out into the wild and wait for a tree to call to them. When they’ve been selected by a particular tree, they spend a half a day with the tree, looking at it, sitting under it, being aware of it. Later they return to the group of people with the knowledge they have gained. Some’ explains that “trees and plants are the most intelligent beings ... they live closer to the meaning behind language.” He suggests the potential of trees to be our spiritual companions.

I’ve found people in this culture who have discovered this truth. One woman, who is a writer, had a “figure it out” tree in England. When she had a big problem to solve, she would take her dogs and a lunch and spend the day under the tree, leaning against it, and trusting for a certain wisdom to become present to her. She said, “It always grounded me. It was probably one of my best friends.” Now that she lives in Minneapolis, she has found a new “figure it out” tree.

Another woman, also a writer, said her best friend as a child was a tree, an oak tree in the park across the street from her house. She spent many hours camped out in the branches with a book and snacks. One year when she came home from college, the tree had been cut down. She never got to say good-bye.

Instead of interviewing a tree, I went to the library to look up trees. The amount of paper in all the books represents a good number of felled trees (probably spruce), and I was thinking how much I love trees, and how much I love books. But I didn’t feel like I had to choose between them, as is suggested in Joyce Kilmer’s famous tree poem—almost everyone who writes about trees feels compelled to cite Kilmer. The first line is: “I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.” Comparing poems to trees is just not the point. I think the poem isn’t even about trees, it’s about Kilmer doubting his own talent. Be that as it may. I learned interesting things about trees at the library.

Between natural disasters and human shortsightedness (a more common natural disaster), there are fewer and fewer trees in the world. Deforestation has been occurring worldwide for centuries. We all know about the ongoing, intentional cutting of the great rain forests in South America and Africa, and, most recently, about the hundreds of old trees in New Orleans that may stand underwater, rotting, until it’s too late to recover.

Maybe it’s not common knowledge that by the time of the American Revolutionary War, settlers in the Eastern United States had already made a substantial dent in the 400,000 square miles of apparently endless forest they found in America. This is according to “Red Oaks and Black Birches,” by Rebecca Rupp (my new favorite writer—would you believe a book about trees that you couldn’t put down and that made you laugh ‘til you cried?).

Here’s another deforestation story you’ve probably never heard: One time in Spain I met some biologists who were working high in the mountains to restore plant environments from the previous centuries—kind of like the prairie restoration projects in our Minneapolis parks. They told me that hundreds of years ago Spain was such a forested country that a squirrel could start in Galicia (the northwest corner of the country) and travel by treetop to Almeria (the southeast corner of the country). In no way could that happen now in the craggy, arid countryside of Spain. I don’t know what caused the change.

There have been many large-scale tree-planting efforts in the past several hundred years, but it isn’t known if they will offset the losses. Nebraska was almost treeless when the State Legislature came up with the idea for Arbor Day, which was established in 1872. Nebraska led the nation by planting a million trees in the first year, and 600 million in the 16 years following. Christmas tree businesses caused deforestation concerns for more than 100 years, but since the 1980s, about 80 million new trees are planted each year in the United States. Another project to promote tree growth is transplanting certain trees that don’t do well in their native environments to similar terrains in other parts of the world, where, strangely, they thrive like crazy. One example is the Monterey pine, native to Monterey, Calif., which, at home, grows slowly and doesn’t spread. In New Zealand and Australia it grows up to 8 feet in one year and has spread over large areas to become the principal tree for general timber and paper pulp.

It seems like a good idea, generally, to leave trees alone and “let nature take its course.” But there are evidently times to intervene. I was inspired when I read an article in a small town newspaper about a retired music professor who personally conducted a census of the town’s trees—the one’s for which the City was responsible, that is, on the boulevards and in the parks. He counted and identified 3,000 trees. He described why certain trees had been chosen for certain spots.
I went around my block and counted 157 trees. But that was all of them, not just the ones the City plants and watches over. I noticed many volunteers that people are just letting grow. I have one, too, but I keep cutting the other ones down—a few elms and a walnut. Actually, I think my remaining backyard elm and its partner that got Dutch elm disease were probably volunteers many years ago. If the survivor turns out to be healthy when we check it next June, I will have it inoculated.

Trees are a source of profound metaphor, mystery, mystique, symbolism and spiritual significance.

There is a week in May when the crabapple trees on the boulevards burst into brilliant fuschia bloom. You have to make a point of looking hard at them every day because you know they will soon be gone again for another year. You can’t take any moment of it for granted. After a long, scraggly, dimly-lit winter, I look forward to it more than any other event, and consider it my favorite “holiday.” Those flowering crabapples definitely symbolize the end of winter.

A friend of mine wouldn’t get through the dark holidays without a Christmas tree. She is a person who has suffered endlessly through no fault of her own. She has endured numerous losses and pain that would topple most of us. And then when it can’t get any worse, it does. She talks about how difficult things are for her, yet she is not one to bring you down when you hang out with her. And her suffering does not define her. She is more than that. Her Christmas tree is center-stage, it’s green and smells wonderful. It is part of a continuing tradition, something that will be present time and again and can be anticipated. It embodies her faith in the goodness that exists in the world. All of this symbolism is brought together in her yearly Christmas tree get-togethers when she shares her (sustainable) tree with friends and neighbors.

Sixteenth century Jewish mystics saw the image of the Sephirot (emanations of God) as a tree. That doesn’t seem so far removed from a Christmas tree. Maybe in this culture we are looking for the emanations of God in our Christmas trees.

The Jews celebrate a holiday called Tu B’Shevat, The New Year of the Trees, sometime in January or February, whenever the month of Shevat falls. It’s a day on which God renews the flow of life to the universe. Honoring trees celebrates the continuity of life. In ancient times, marriage trees for children born in the previous year were planted on Tu B’Shevat— cypress seedlings for girls and cedars for boys, When those children grew up and got married, branches from their trees were used to build the marriage canopy.

Since trees take a long time to grow, the many tree-planting ceremonies in the Western world officially challenge our “right” to instant gratification. They tie us to the future. They make us wait.

Trees also tie us to the past. Many people plant trees in memory of loved ones. My mother planted a pear tree in her front yard when my father died. On a large scale, The Forest of the Martyrs was planted in Israel/Palestine in 1949, and will eventually have six million trees, in remembrance of the Jews killed in the holocaust.

There are many historic trees, too. For example, the Iroquois, whose model of a democratic society influenced the creation of the U.S. Constitution, buried their weapons under a great white pine they called The Tree of Peace. The tree was a symbol of The Great Law of Peace, which said that the huge variety of human communities had to be considered equally valuable. And that to insure individual freedom in a democracy, power had to be distributed equally.