Dancing with Trees

Do you have a tree you know personally?

I remember in grade school being taken on some sort of nature walk with my class where we were out in the woods.   The leader pointed to various trees and told us stories about them as if they were people:  “This one is an old granny who thinks…   This one is a young and willful child who wants to trip people by sticking out its root, etc.”  The she encouraged us to go up and down the path and find a tree that we understood its story.   For the next hour we took each other to various trees and told their stories.

As an adult many of the photos I have taken are of unique trees whose stories I feel.   Here are some examples:

These two trees became lovers young and grew up together and their lives are wound together and infact imbedded in each other.  When one dies the other will as well – they cannot live without each other.

This tree could not withstand the wind storm and finally let go of its hold on life, but it was caught in the arms of this younger tree who holds its mourning, apparently forever. 

       

This tree was touched by human love

This ancestor's life nourishes the next generation.

                                                                                               This off spring is a little "non-traditional".

This tree took what humanity threw at it and worked with it…undaunted.

My Meeting sits at the top of hill with a road that spirals up to the top through a grove of second growth, old growth – we look out the picture window at the beauty and grander of these trees.  Once, during a windstorm, if memory serves me right during Meeting for worship, one of the bigger trees came down…with a rather loud thud.   Someone gave ministry wondering what the other trees thought about this.   I have recently learned about mycelium, the white fibers that come off of roots.  Apparently science is learning that plants and trees communicate in some sort of way with each other through the mycelial path.   So in fact perhaps the trees did mourn for their elder who had died. 

 

Shortly thereafter one of the founding members of our Meeting died.   At the memorial someone recalled the big tree that come down and the ministry that had been given suggesting that the other trees were effected.  They likened this elder of the Meeting’s death to the loss the trees has suffered, changing the whole landscape.   At the time I felt concerned both that there are not enough young Quakers and that it seemed to me that we only had big old trees, no little trees.  Then I walked through the woods and discovered hundreds of little seedlings and was able to notice other 10 year saplings not that tall obscured by the bigger trees.  I realized “oh yes the big ones take up all the attention but the little ones are there quietly growing.”  I was reassured.

The trees of my Meeting

Recently the city told us the water pipes to our building our 50 years old and considered to small and to old and likely to leak and needing to be replaced.   They wanted us to give them eminent domain over a path from the road that would have cut through the property of one of our members who lives on the road and across part of our road.  They were going to cut down trees…about a dozen of these large old trees in order to accomplish this.

The first response of our group was to feel like “we had to”, for the practical reason of not getting a water leak.   But when I gently prodded us to examine this some more – was there no other way?  Were the pipes really at risk or just a “bigger and better” mentality,  was there a different path that would effect less trees, etc.  We began to slow down and ask more questions of the city.  It became clear the city planner who made the plan had never left his office, had just made the plan from a map – did not even know about these woods.  Our member on the street got an arborist to come out.  He told her among other things that it was thousands of dollars worth of trees and would detrimentally affect the woods.  He gave her a little courage to fight and when the Meeting learned she was going to, we said we would stand in unity with her.  So she and the clerk asked the city to come up with some other plan.  They then came up with the  plan of boring through the ground to get the pipe in which will not kill the trees!  (which I suspect will be equal or less than the cost of all that logging.) So the sillium of the woods are communicating their relief to each other.

I wish this were the end of the story, but it is not.  At the bottom of our spiral drive is a lot that a woman who was mentally ill lived in till the end of her life.  She did not care for her home, nor pay her taxes.  So the house needs to be torn down and the city seized it for back taxes last year.  We knew it would be sold and just hoped a developer would not buy it.  Around the time we thought to tell the real estate agent that we would oppose any development that took the trees on the property down…it was too late.   It was sold.   Nothing has happened for quite a while, and it was possible to forget about this.  I had imagined they would leave all the perimeter trees and take down the center of the plot ones to build.  But the member of our Meeting who lives on the street announced last Sunday that she had heard they were coming to cut them down…all of them.  I’m scared that the loss of about 1/6 of the entire woods will be such a shock to the surviving trees as to weaken and damage this whole interwoven forest eco-system.

over 3 centuries ago a philosopher named Descartes made treaties which much of western civilization was built upon, that said things like body and mind were separate, and earth and “man” were separate.  We are now facing a crisis so severe, climate change, that it threatens all life on the planet.  We arrived at this severe place out of just this Descartian error of viewing nature as separate from us: as something to use, to take advantage of, of something we had dominion over, or control over.   We failed to see ourselves as part of it or to understand that what we did to the earth we did to the host body of which we were one cell, one life form within a larger life form.   Regarding trees we have seen them as lumber (an object to use), scenery (something outside ourselves to view), or an obstruction to somewhere we were trying to get or to build and thus something to cut down/remove.  We have not seen them as part of our ecosystem, or as carbon sink protecting our air, or as living forms.  We most certainly have not seen them as personalities like my nature guide did. 

 

This weekend at Quarterly Friends Meeting we were invited in query to ask what if all life (not just humans) had a Light within?  For myself I know it would mean I could not just cut down a tree to suit my own purposes.  I have never understood people who chained themselves to trees and risked arrest to protect them, but I am starting to understand them.  But more profoundly I would have to learn to think about myself as part of network of life with reciprocal life relationships.