ecospirit

I am sitting by the South Toe River with my friend Robin Dreyer, both in beach chairs. Before us are two gigantic trees. They are so tall that you can't see the tops. I can't see any leaves, but their bark is oak. These trees are superimposed upon the river backdrop. I notice that the one on the right, which is much larger, has a huge fissure about two-thirds up, looking like a monumental lightning strike. At its base, a black slurry oozes out, running towards the Toe.

A young Germanic engineer conducts a tour of the bigger tree. I watch as he shows the two bottom floors of an immense, towering inner space, freshly painted in pastel yellow. The ceiling, several hundred feet above us, is a windowed cupola in the style of Stanford University. The young man opens a door from the spacious lobby to a hospital check-in area. On the two floors, about 10-12 rooms have been finished, all inhabited by retired nuns, some ancient. He explains that the authorities had planned to outfit the entire interior with all the accoutrements of a little planned city, but they ran out of money and resources. This was what was left.

Leaving the tour, heading back into the bright sunshine, I look closely again at the second tree, noticing that a spring flows from its base as well. It is clear and sparkles in the sunlight as it runs towards our river.

I won't go into a detailed interpretation. Much of it is self-explanatory. I do want to note two things. One is why Robin Dreyer is in the dream; the key is his name. Noting the black slurry coming from the poisoned Tree of Life, I associate immediately John McCutcheon's rendering of Jean Ritchie's "BlackWaters," a lament for Appalachian coal country. And then the thought comes, we are robbin' the Earth dry, drier than it's ever been.

The second is that there are two trees. We are killing the first one; it is beyond hope (both secular industry and Constantine's Church which has buttressed it). But the second one, representing for me the continued evolution on Earth over the one to two billion years remaining until the sun's red giant status extinguishes terrestrial life, is healthy, the spring waters at its base pristine.

Mourn the passing of the first oak. Weep loudly. But take joy in what is to come from the second Tree of Life, whether our human eyes observe it or not. Mammalian emotions are widespread in the age of mammals which is crumbling around us. But besides an overcharged frontal cortex attached to both those emotions and a reptilian brain at its stem, we have imagination. Let's use and celebrate it 'til the end, watching the sunlight dance on those pure springwaters.

When I was twelve years old I invented a religion centered around trees. Its central testament was that trees were the highest form of life on Earth, represented in the spirit realm by beings I called girabs. Trees' energy I measured in units called koonces. The chief rite in my religion was to stop and pray, mumbling gibberish, honoring any dead trees I came upon. This tree-religion had two adherents, myself and my first cousin Joe. Our practice lasted about a year.

Reading Overstory recalls this period for me, which was the culmination of a childhood in which I revered nature, regularly retreating to places outside as my private inner space. I continued to spend time alone in the forest through adolescence at a boys boarding school south of Birmingham, Alabama, staying on campus during weekends when my friends went back to town to party. The school's campus was laid out by the sons of the great landscapist Frederick Law Olmstead, and the property included 300 acres of wild forestland, where I ran cross country. As an adult, I moved to a 1200 acre landtrust in the Highlands of NC, bounded on many sides by National Forest. The legendary chestnut-oak forest has now been replaced by a predominately oak-hickory forest.

I built my house in the middle of the woods. With my new chainsaw, I hesitated as I began to cut a swathe for the road, but there was no other housing available, so I forged ahead, framing the house with the oak and poplar I had cut. I wrote a couple of posts ago about the necessity of cutting back a row of hickories which blocked incoming sunlight for the solar house, destroying the nest of southern red flying squirrels. Most of us in the landtrust live in or adjacent to the forest, so cutting trees is a regular necessity. Overall, though, we preserve our trees, which are nearing or have arrived at a second climax 45 years after we moved here. I have hiked in Colorado, the Sierras, the Himalayas, and the mountains of Southern France, but I always prefer the forested peaks or our Black Mountains to those more dramatic mountainscapes.

My son Jesse is a ranger at Yosemite, having lived there almost twenty years. Several years ago, I attended a mini-workshop at its Muir Cabin by David Abram, eco-phenomenologist, writer, and magician. Abram conducted an exercise in which, after experiencing a natural object-being with as many senses as we could manage, we consciously reversed the subject-object relation, the trees becoming the subjects. This was transformative, and I now realize that it recovered for me an entire childhood in which I imagined trees as (usually) friendly subjects. I had stored a whole wellspring of ensouled forest beings. Since this time, I have led the exercise in my own workshops, and continued to practice it periodically, mostly willy-nilly.

Two examples. One I wrote about in this blog many years ago, when I cut a tree along my road and it spurted tannic tree-blood. The other was a few years back when I was seriously planning to cut a tall oak in my solar insolation shed. I had contemplated this act for many months, but once I made the decision to go ahead, the energy became palpable. Standing on my deck seventy-five feet away, I felt a strong energy field from that tree, and it wouldn't go away. As I looked at the tree, it dawned on me that it was giving a distinct message: I am here, tall, beautiful and healthy. Do you really want to end this tree-life? I swallowed, and realized that I needed to be very intentional about this. Two weeks later, a logger cut the tree, which was leaning towards my storage shed.

So yes, as a right-wing Christian Confederate re-enactor in the local paper said of me a couple of years back, I am a tree-hugger, even a worshipper of trees (I explained in response that I was a panentheist, though I didn't use the term). Embracing a tree is a remarkable experience. I experience presence, though it is clearly other. And listening for communication means really slowing down - way down, as Powers insists in his book. The last time I did this was on a recent walk up the ridge beyond my house, where a very old oak stands that suffered a huge fissure, perhaps lightning, when it was very young, but then grew back together over five feet above the initial wound separation. I felt immense, quiet energy, and realized I would need far more time than I had that day to fully receive the communication that the ancient oak was emitting.

I want to end with a dream I had a year or so ago. It is placed locally, but I experience it as a Big Dream whose purport reaches beyond my life and little world. Read on in the next post.