2nd Advent: Tree behind the Tree

“…Yet I have glimpsed the bright mountain behind the mountain,
Knowledge under the leaves, tasted the bitter berries red,
Drunk water cold and clear from an inexhaustible hidden fountain.”

from ‘The Wilderness’, Kathleen Raine

It’s great to see all the new and renewed awareness of people and people of faith in the goodness of trees, and what trees show us. New forest churches, old forest churches, books about God and trees. A recent study found that by simply planting lots of trees, humankind could help mitigate and even reverse dimensions of climate change.

(Some techno-utopians dismissed this study, instead proffering lithium ion batteries and planetary solar radiation shields. How could anything go wrong with the latter? An eclectic if careful attitude for selecting useful technology + reducing/converting consumption patterns, especially in the ‘developed world,’ is more on target.)

Planting trees is simple, and available in the hands of even the poorest on earth. Trees provide shade, fuel, food and fodder. They can improve watersheds and stabilize erosive land. They give a nest to birds and wildlife.

And they can help anyone with his or her feet firmly on the earth see things in a more whole, complete way.

Douglas Fir in cemetery

photo by Evan Clendenin

My dog helped me to let this tree help me see anew. I was trying to move along on a walk, and he insistently looked up in there for signs of squirrel. Or maybe he was seeing or smelling something else. So I paused to look.

Mr. J reading another fir’s branches for signs of squirrel. photo by Evan Clendenin

Two days later, we were out walking again in the same cemetery. Some one had put out some little pumpkins at a grave. I noticed that these had been nibbled or chewed.

My mind thought that something was eating the pumpkins. A squirrel? A rat? deer? possum? raccoon? coyote? bear? None of these were entirely implausible. My dog was in a mood to sit and watch that day again. So I stood meditating on what I had noticed, looking again and thinking. Did I see other animal sign? tracks? scat? Earlier the ground had been even a bit frozen. I noticed that the pumpkins had not been completely eaten. They showed teeth marks, but as if they had been opened up, like when we make a jack-o-lantern and remove the seeds. And then I saw the seed hulls all over the ground nearby.

Squirrel, raccoon or a murder of crows, I had met the signs of a skillful seed extractor.

This is the kind of ‘seeing’ trees help us to discover. You see something present in and behind what is most visible. When my dog had insisted we stop and look longer at the large fir, I saw in new ways. I dwellt there, read slowly, being formed by the tree. Branch for branch, it also brought me back to ‘Jesse Trees.’

By Anonymous - from [1] Original uploader was SimonP. Originally from en.wikipedia; description page is/was here., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2002026

It fits stories together into a larger story, a deeper memory, an image of the more complete landscape we share with others, visible and invisible.

So this Advent and Christmas, you might yet craft a Jesse tree of stories at home. Through that tree you might look upon the world and the scriptures with new sight and read new things there.

A shoot from Jesse’s stump (Isaiah 11:1). A branch of God (Isaiah 4:2) beautiful and glorious, of excellence and splendor.

A tree whose cool shade might calm raging fires, whose gathering of interior fire, from carbon dioxide into lignin and other carbon compounds, pulls the excess energy out of storms. Whose fruit we might receive, ponder, delight in.

Come spring, you can plant some shoots, seeds and tree starts. Feet on the ground, hands, mind and heart upon a living tree.

B&TW will have chestnut seedlings, and links to tree nurseries, February-May 2021.