Thursday, May 30, 2019

 

My Life with Trees


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 The legendary chestnut-oak forest has now been replaced by a predominately oak-hickory forest.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.

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# posted by Robert McGahey @ 12:09 PM 0 Comments

Thursday, September 11, 2008

 

Forgive them, for they know not what they do

But what if we do indeed know what we do? A small number of ecologists, climate scientists, and elders of first peoples have known that we are crucifying the earth for a long time. And now, many more have witnessed "An Inconvenient Truth," and thus recognize that we are creating an accelerating greenhouse effect by burning up the earth's fossilized carbon sinks. But the vast majority of us are unwilling to take personal responsibility for this greatest of sins because of our habit of easy compliance with the structural sin of global industrial capitalism. This sin is condoned by the church itself, as the initial Protestant blessing of its children, seeing those who reaped the abundance of capitalism as a sign of God's favor, has morphed into the church's sanction of rampant greed in the late industrial and terminal holocene ages.


Unfettered corporate behavior, complicit with sovereign nations' pandering to their richest citizens' comfort over all other government responsibilities defines the deeply entrenched structural sin whereby we have thoroughly commoditized the earth. Though we protect ourselves by burying the guilt the moment it starts to grow in our hearts, deep down we know that our everyday actions trash the earth. But as my cousin says, that's somebody else's problem. Let the government take care of it.


We know not that we crucify something divine by poisoning the atmosphere? That would be pantheism, the whole terrible universe experienced as divine. But if God is the Ground of Being, the beloved earth is His raiments. For the pantheist, it is divine simply as it is. For the panentheist, it is divine because God made it, working from within, its holy source.


And does the traditional Christian, viewing the earth from God's perspective above and around her in the vastness of space, does she not also know what we do? God told us to be stewards, and the closer we look at our lives, the more we realize we defy him. We are not stewards, except in the limited ways we tithe to the earth at the margins of our economic lives. So in this sense, we do know what we do.


Forgive them... How can we be forgiven if we knowingly destroy creation? The earth cannot forgive; she can only heal though adaptation. And what would the Creator's forgiveness entail? Given that the earth is entering old age, there is probably insufficient time to recover the complexity of higher life, once extinct, during her remaining lifetime. Accepting such divine forgiveness would entail a faith of cosmic dimensions, trusting the everabundant Creator to recreate the unlikely conditions of life on earth in another universe, either with a new start or in some kind of "parallel play" in which theoretical physicists like to speculatively engage.


But do we really know what we are doing to the earth? I was at a discussion this spring of global challenges with a group of highly educated, spiritually grounded "elders" (our median age was in the 60's). One woman blurted, "We're not in crisis." Industrial urban life hides eco-justice and social justice effects from the consumer, for our resource and trade base is the whole world. Lacking systemic thinking and moral imagination, we are blind to the beginning wave of distant environmental refugees, the huge holes in the fabric of Gaia opening as we dredge the seas for protein, and slash and burn rainforests. And at home in our comfortable enclaves, we ignore the small, but numerous signs of the unraveling of Gaia's web.


Isn't our collective behavior the sign of an addiction so deeply entrenched that we cannot fathom it? The order of sin from within late industrial capitalism is so enormous that we in our complicity can scarcely imagine being forgiven. How can we contemplate the level of forgiveness required if we cannot even imagine the sin itself?


The scale of the Creators’ forgiveness is beyond our imagining, even when we realize we have been complicit in the murder of Creation. Facing up to this complicity can be a huge burden. Personally, I need to move beyond superego-driven, human judgment to allow divine compassion. It is not up to me to forgive. Yet as along as I am part of this culture, however aware and careful I am with my material choices, I simply cannot honestly accept Jesus' admonition, Go, and sin no more. Go where on this commoditized earth? To do so would be to accept self-annihilation, and to wish my own or my species’ death would be blasphemy, for we are integral to Creation. Once we accept ecological sin, we need to accept the infinite nature of God's forgiveness, even unto the end of the earth.

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# posted by Robert McGahey @ 2:54 PM 0 Comments

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