The majesty of trees: celebrating the Season of Creation

Between any two trees, there is a doorway leading to a new way of life.
~ John Muir ~

Trees are among the most powerful beings on the planet. Solid and magnificent, they cover and hold together a third of Earth’s surface. Their cooling, oxygen-laden breath insures the existence of the rest of life. They are full of magic and mystery. They exert their power both spiritually and literally, with vast under- and aboveground connections to the life of the planet.

Strong roots and extensive threads of mycelial networks ground them deep into the earth and keep them in touch with the rest of the forest. In their green canopies, they speak with the sun. They feed their young, support their neighbors, house and feed the wildlife of the woods.

The oak alone supports up to 2300 species. Conifers plan their families. Aspen clones form huge colonies; one is over 100 acres. Trees foster community, pulling their branches back from neighboring trees, allowing the sun to reach the younger plants below.

From the beginning, they have held sway over our imaginations. Yggdrasil was the tree of life in Norse mythology. With branches reaching to heaven and roots deep into Earth, it linked heaven to the underworld, holding the cosmos together. Such revered trees can be found in cultures worldwide.

According to Genesis, the lure of the Tree of Knowledge meant the downfall of humanity’s grace in the Garden of Eden. Oaks have long represented wisdom and strength. Wearing crowns of oak leaves was a status symbol for ancient Greeks, Romans, and Celts. They were the preferred trees in druids’ sacred groves. Stands of sycamores provided peace for the Egyptian dead.

Throughout history, people everywhere have inhabited trees with spirits who reigned over the forests. To injure or cut down a tree was a serious undertaking, often an offense. Though our cultural materialism is long past such beliefs, trees — and the lives and spirits they support — have not forgotten. That’s what I’m celebrating today.

Churches the world over set aside September 1 to October 4, the anniversary of Francis of Assisi’s death, to contemplate the wonders of the earth and what we need to do to foster them. This is my eighth celebration of the Season of Creation, launched as a single day in 1989 by Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I. Over the years more and more denominations have joined from every part of the globe. Pope Francis put it on the Catholic calendar in 2015 with the publication of his encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si.

I started my celebrations with quotes from this visionary document. Since then I’ve quoted wisdom from other faith leaders, scientists, activists, and poets; celebrated beauty, water, and wings. Pairing them all with photos of the wonders I’ve seen wandering our sublime planet. For Season of Creation 2024, I’ve chosen poetry and prose that ponder the majesty, wisdom, and messages of trees.

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The ridge, its long withdrawing slopes gracefully modeled and braided, reaching from climate to climate, feathered with trees that are the kings of their race, their ranks nobly marshaled to view, spire above spire, crown above crown, waving their long, leafy arms, tossing their cones like ringing bells—blessed sun-fed mountaineers rejoicing in their strength, every tree tuneful, a harp for the wind and the rain.
~ John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra ~

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Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
(I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always drop fruit as I pass;)
~ Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road ~

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In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree …
Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
~ Herman Hesse, Wanderings ~

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With your eyes, which are almost too tired
to free themselves from the familiar, 
you slowly take one black tree  
and set it against the sky: slender, alone. 
And you have made a world.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

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I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley ~

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The worshipful cold spring light on the sandbanks of the river, the immense silent redwoods. Who can see such trees and bear to be away from them? I must go back. It is not right that I should die under lesser trees.”
~ Thomas Merton, When the Trees Say Nothing ~

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I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me … on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red conelike blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward.

I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to … farmers and lumber dealers and woodchoppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down … Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men’s heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature’s … children; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walking ~

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The oak tree:
not interested
in cherry blossoms.
~ Basho ~

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I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.
~ e. e. cummings ~

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Trees need not walk the earth
For beauty or for bread;
Beauty will come to them
Where they stand…
In the rainbow—
The sunlight—
And the lilac-haunted rain;
And bread will come to them
As beauty came:
In the rainbow—
In the sunlight—
In the rain.
~ David Rosenthal, Trees Need Not Walk the Earth ~

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We’re all — trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria — pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship….

Our ethic must therefore be one of belonging, an imperative made all the more urgent by the many ways that human actions are fraying, rewiring, and severing biological networks worldwide. To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.
~ David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees ~

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These were the woods the river and sea
           Where a boy
       In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
       And the mystery
           Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.
~ Dylan Thomas, Poem in October ~

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Why are trees such social beings? Why do they share food with their own species and sometimes even go so far as to nourish their competitors? The reasons are the same as for human communities: there are advantages to working together. A tree is not a forest … together, many trees create an ecosystem …. The community must remain intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age…

Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover. Next time, perhaps it will be the other way round, and the supporting tree might be the one in need of assistance.

A tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it.
~ Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees ~

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I sense that that tree is much more than what I directly see of it, since it is also what the others whom I see perceive of it; I sense that as a perceivable presence it already existed before I came to look at it, and indeed that it will not dissipate when I turn away from it, since it remains an experience for others—not just for other persons, but for other sentient organisms, for the birds that nest in its branches and for the insects that move along its bark, and even, finally, for the sensitive cells and tissues of the oak itself, quietly drinking sunlight through its leaves. It is this informing of my perceptions by the evident perceptions and sensations of other bodily entities that establishes, for me, the relative solidity and stability of the world.
~ David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous ~

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To be one with trees is to have access to one’s interiority. Cathedrals were created to replicate and cultivate this quality of conscious interiority. Trees provide entry into the heart of all earth-matter, talking in a language that body and soul understand. Destroy a forest and you destroy the heart of community. Everything becomes fugitive: animals, plants, insects, even the soil.
~ Andrea Mathieson ~

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Tree locations from top to bottom: Larkspur, California (top two); Whidbey Island, Washington; mid California coast; next two: Blairstown, New Jersey; Larkspur, California; Lagunitas, California; Tiburon, California; Bishop, California; Novato, California; East Hampton, New York; Rogue River Valley, Oregon; Hoh Rain Forest, Washington; Blairstown, New Jersey; Santa Rosa, California; Whidbey Island, Washington.

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All Season of Creation celebrations can be found HERE.

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