Sacred Trees

"Why are there trees that I never walk under but large

and melodious thoughts descend upon me?"
-Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road.

I engaged in a perhaps slightly comical act of guerrilla sanctification last night. Under cover of darkness, I gently and loosely tied a loop of kite string around the cedar tree next to the driveway and hung shide on it. I am not precisely Shinto (nor can you probably really be Shinto unless you are Japanese and actually living in Japan), but Shinto has a spiritual vocabulary, if you will, that I find useful. Shide are the zigzag paper strips like the ones hanging from the sacred tree above. Sacred trees in Shinto are called shinboku. 

My idea of such things is a little different from Shinto. In Shinto, a kami or spirit descends into the tree. To me, the spirit is the tree, the tree's heart or soul if you like. Although Shinto seems to preserve many things from what you might call primitive or ancient animism, there is also much that has been mutated by progress and the historical worship of the Japanese State/Emperors and so on, perversions honestly. In most Shinto temples there is an enclosure that is supposed to represent a house or dwelling for the kami: in the most ancient form of Shinto still represented in a couple places, the holy of holies is not indoors somewhere, it is the very tree or mountain or whatever that the shrine is built around or on. 

For the most part, there are seldom any new sacred trees recognized in Japan except in the places where an old sacred tree has died. I guess the idea is, guys in the old days had the perceptual wherewithal to recognize such things, whereas this ability has been lost in modern times. It hasn't been lost, it has been stopped. Why do Christians think miracles happened in Jesus' time and not now? They think that there was an "age of miracles" which ended somehow after New Testament times. It didn't stop itself, people stopped it. In both cases, when a Way stops being a living path of love and starts being a dead institution, this happens. The very word, Way, indicates a place where things are in motion. That was the original name of Christianity, simply "the Way." In Christianity and Shinto both, things ceased to be in motion because that sort of motion is inherently destabilizing to nacent power structures. You start getting Bishops, you stop getting John the Baptists.

Why was it a guerrilla act of sanctification? This was much on my mind as I was doing it, how bizarre this was. In this country, you can desecrate forests wholesale in broad daylight, and nobody thinks it is abnormal. If you acknowledge the specialness of a tree, especially here in the Bible Belt, people think you are damn weird and maybe dangerous, but certainly in need of some kind of mental health assistance. Put that boy on some Haldol, stat. ;) 

I didn't want to contaminate what I am doing by being put in a position of having to explain to someone that their whole worldview is desperately ill. Which is what I truly believe. But still, while I was doing it, I was thinking: 

"Either I am mentally ill or this society is, and I almost wish it were me.

It would almost be reassuring, to know that the
whole human world hasn't gone insane."

But, you know, it's not me. Sadly, it's not me. 

But silly me, I have been talking all this time about the human issues of sacred trees and not about the trees. Why have people held trees above other plants as sacred? Well this is not necessarily true in all cultures, in Native American cultures especially a variety of non-tree plants are held as sacred. Corn above all, for those who grow corn. Peyote for some. Other plants, some psychoactive, some not, are held in esteem. Obviously in a desert or plains culture, trees would barely figure in at all. Among trees, not all are equally likely to be held as sacred. Juniper is held sacred by a variety of cultures and by myself also, and oaks are well represented. Pines and various evergreens too. Of course the size and majesty of some trees seems to almost demand our reverence, or so you would think. I love medieval cathedral architecture, it seems to me like a book and a dream made of stone. Sadly, I have never seen one in person, but it seems even from this distance to speak more than mere words could ever have, a three-dimensional living incarnation of a worldview. But if you were to give me a choice between either every cathedral being bulldozed or every giant sequoia being bulldozed, I would tearfully send the cathedrals to the dump. I would rather be sent to the dump myself than have either of those things happen though. To see a giant tree towering to the sky inspires awe: that in itself would be a reason.

It just so happens though that trees are very special people. The great age of some of them may have something to do with it, some can be thousands of years old. The redwood tree above (no I am not that lucky devil hugging it) is a thousand years old. A thousand. When this tree was germinated, the Battle of Hastings hadn't happened yet, the New World lay virgin and pristine, the floating magnetic compass had not yet been discovered in China. 1013 A.D. That's a very very long freaking time ago. If my own experiences are to be believed, that is part of what they have to offer us: a long and very rooted view of time. And of course many trees have extremely practical things to offer us in the form of nuts and fruits and wood. I love my fig tree that has been giving me breakfast every morning over the past few weeks, I call her Mother Fig. It's amazing, how tiny the little seeds are in the fig. These tiny grains of sand almost give birth under the right conditions to a whole tree that can give you shade and fruit and feed the birds and squirrels. It's magic, truly.

What do we have to offer them? Well right now, only a few practical things. The vast majority of people in the world currently lack the mentality to offer them anything, except a pruning or a few shovels of compost. What should we have been offering them? What is the function of the human being in the world?

I would like very much to avoid ascribing intentionality to our existence in the world. Nature just does stuff. Nature just had a wild hair one day and decided, "hominids, think I will give them a try, see what pops up, what the heck." ;) Many such experiments have taken place, and many such experiments have faded away again in time. However I think that we did adapt to a certain role in the world and then lost that role for the most part. That role was as nodes of a sort, ganglia, in the nervous system of the biosphere. The neurotransmitters of this nervous system were prayers and praise and thanks. We would talk to the plant people and animal people and see what was on their minds, see what they needed, and then maybe we would talk to the sky people for instance if rain was needed, or if the air needed freshening. Tribespeople would ask for things and their medicine people would balance the needs of the people against the needs of nature and something would get worked out. Or maybe something was out of balance and needed to be corrected to restore the normal flow of things. Plants and animals might benefit from human spiritual energy in the form of praise and reverence and prayers and thanks, and humans would benefit from plant and animal bodies to keep their own bodies alive. 

Of course, almost nothing of this is happening now over much of the world. Something I have often wondered about or just ascribed to the general wonderfulness of their being: why are trees so often so glad to see me? In the days before the internet and radio, I would imagine that people would be very glad to see the postman, because he is their connection to what is happening elsewhere or to talk with distant family and friends or to petition their representatives in far-off Washington. A local node of their internet is back online, for the first time in gods only know when.

I will not say that this is our function necessarily, we probably don't have a function per se, but that it should be our function and once was. Whoever the people were who originally saw the sacredness of the trees and springs and other natural things now held sacred in Shinto belief, they were part of this nervous system. It is part of that function that we put ourselves beneath those we connect in this way. The Hopi for instance called the rainclouds their grandfathers, overtly because they thought their ancestors affected their world by bringing rain, but on a more basic level because they ask the rain to come through reverence and prayers. There could not be any greater difference between this and the Western occult ideas of magic, where the magician compels the natural forces to work for him. This is fundamentally what happened to us: because of our role we had a certain power, and we became enamored with that power and forgot what it was for. 

This is ultimately and fundamentally our problem, the problem of human beings in the world right now. We forgot what the power was for. We traded love for brute might. 

I'm doing it again, aren't I? I started out to talk about sacred trees, and wound up talking about us.

"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you

come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release

this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these

miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that

gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some

ways, responsible for all our troubles — 

this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people

when they see what they can do with their minds."

-Freeman Dyson

Mushroom Cloud, Hiroshima.