not native fruit

crimson christmas

We've had an unusually colorful Christmas season this year due to the combination of drought and a couple of cold snaps.  Normally rain and wind would have denuded all the trees on our streets that aren't evergreen, but this year almost every neighborhood was decked out in crimson.

 

 

 

 

nature and culture

I was perusing the obits, which I rarely do, and came across one for professor Doug Adams of the Pacific School of Religion at GTU.  His interest was the blending of theology and the arts.  One of his former students wrote: "'I probably would have been still stuck in a darkroom someplace doing documentary photography were it not for Doug Adams (who) taught (me) that a passion for the arts did not exclude (me) from a religious life.'  For his master's degree thesis, (the student) took a series of landscape photographs to examine the question that if the earth is God's body, how do different cultures treat God?  One of the pictures was of a strip mine."

We know which culture that was.

I've been reading about the Moorish culture, which was very much dedicated to horticulture: gardens and orchards, fountains and canals, and which brought agriculture to Spain in the eighth century C.E. So it would seem that older forms of Islamic culture had a loving, relational attitude towards nature, would 'cultivate' and 'care for' and 'husband' nature.

Orchards are important to many peoples.  It is said that abandoned Susquehanna Indian camps could always be identified by the old wild apple orchards in their vicinities in Pennsylvania, by the early explorers and settlers.  Also, my Danish relatives prized their gardens with fruit trees, where they would eat all their meals during the summer months.

I've visited India, where it would seem that the older versions of Hinduism still worship nature.  Rivers and trees, and sometimes even stones are seen as sacred at the least, and as embodiments of God at most.  Cows, too, are viewed as sacred, as are a wide variety of plants, including Bilwa and Tulsi.  They are adorned by flower garlands, daubed with sandal paste, and honored.

My whimsy tells me that the older forms of European Christianity 'sanctified' nature - as if she needed it - by dedicating the old sacred wells and fountains to various Christian saints. Kind of sweet, including nature in its otherworldly vision of salvation.   Fact tells us, however, that it also cut down the old sacred trees, which must have been very large and ancient.  Of course, by now they would have probably died of natural causes anyway, but it does seem sad to think of them being cut down because of raw ideology.

I think this photographer had a very good idea.  To judge a culture's view of God, by observing how it interacts with Nature.  Food for thought. 

live oak

I've been working one day a week in a neighborhood in Oakland that reminds me of the place where I grew up.  Shabby houses, interspersed by poor but well-attended houses, children in cheap clothing shepherding younger siblings through the streets on the way to the playground, low-level drug-dealers cruising in their old, salvaged cars, and unemployed men walking around trying to look scary.

A tree like this one is the grace of such a place: it brings hope, beauty, fun, a door into another reality, a memory in later years.

Thank God there are trees like this in impoverished places.

the hazel trees

"In the beginning Love satisfies us.
When Love first spoke to me of love -
How I laughed at her in return!
But then she made me like the hazel trees,
Which blossom early in the season of darkness,
And bear fruit slowly."

~ Hadewijch of Antwerp, circa thirteenth century

more sycamores

Maybe it's because sycamores surround our North Berkeley library, and lined many of the older streets in colonial Germantown, where I grew up, but I just have that association of them with ancient wisdom and knowledge. 

A Russian friend of mine studied with a shaman in her native land, and she takes people on nature walks and teaches about trees; how to interact with them spiritually, what each variety's special gifts are, and how to identify the charisms of individual trees.  She never mentioned sycamores in any of the walks I took with her, but I must say that when I spend time with them, I definitely get a studious vibe, a great love of knowledge and the arts.  The Humanities, as we might say, and not particularly the sciences. 

When I look up sycamores in my various sources on symbols, I don't find much.  Apparently they were called 'pharoah's fig' and were considered sacred in Egypt.  That makes sense, because they do look like tall massive fig trees, so they are the King (or Pharoah) of Fig-trees, I suppose.  Also, it's mentioned that in the Bible Zacharias climbed the sycamore to get a better look at Christ, and is thus a symbol for becoming god-mad.  But somehow these don't describe what I experience in their presence.  I suppose I'll just have to keep looking, and in the meantime, continue to enjoy the deep feelings of the love of 'study,' of reading and writing, that I have around their stately selves.  Especially in Autumn, but then Autumn is the time to celebrate the goddess of learning, both in India (Navaratri and Vijaya Dashami) and in the U.S.

By the way, there is another Festival of the Trees going on, and the links are listed at the Hoarded Ordinaries site.  Click the link above or go to the side-bar link.

autumn sycamores

Ranged round
the curving
avenues,
you are
an academy
of ancient sages.
I long
to bow
before
your golden crowns
and lay
my ear
upon
your pied bark
listening
to the whisperings
from the dawn
of ethics
and philosophy
down
to our own time.

basket of trees

[a few years ago i thought i'd experiment with the villanelle-form; i was also a student of kundalini psycho-spirituality at the time, so this image of the basket of trees, meaning the marvelously undulating and spiraling forms of the camphors and rhododendrons that surround our house, form-echoes of both the path of kundalini and the structure of the nervous system, was very meaningful to me:]

I live in a basket made of trees

Whose arching boughs uplift my mind

Flickering like leaves tossed in the breeze.

Surface and depth, shadow and light,

My soul space changes always because

I live in a basket made of trees.

The view from my windows grants the gift of height,

Looking all round at the actions of humans

Flickering like leaves tossed in the breeze.

The dark penumbra of these pensive crowns

Are pierced by the penetrating spiritual light;

Flick’ring through this basket of trees,

And woven with rain refreshing the boughs,

Making blissful this dappled experience of time.

Of living in a basket made of trees,

with flickering leaves tossed and changed by the breeze.

trees (and birds)

   i grew up in the shade of norway maples and other larger, grander trees whose names i don't know, and now i live under spreading camphor trees, amid the songs of birds, and i feel unaccountably fortunate.  i can't imagine life without the dappled light of sun through leaves, and when i've lived in treeless zones, i've put lace over the windows to simulate that play of light. 

i grew up in a very urban environment, yet we experienced the luxury of trees.  i've seen photos of treeless villages in places as widely dysjunct as Ireland, China, Africa; have visited relatively treeless villages in Denmark and in western US states.  How can people survive without trees?

I've read that some cultures regard trees as sources of 'yin forces' (ghosts, demons).  Dangerous, because they can uproot and fall on houses, people, cars in heavy weather or when the soil is saturated with water.  I attended a lecture in Tibetan medicine that traced a serious disease to the lacquer tree.  So, I guess there is a down side to trees after all.  On the other hand, we need them to absorb carbon dioxide and to produce oxygen, shade, nuts, resins, firewood, beauty, flowers and fall color, food and homes for birds, and more.

If human beings lived among trees for many generations - and that is definitely the case for europeans - then the milieu of crepuscular light and bird-song is natural to us, and winds down deep streams of association from our senses to our cellular memory and dna. 

Forest Mind.

green epiphany

I grew up in an urban setting, and most of my forays into 'nature' were very manicured: city parks, which were nonetheless truly wonderful places - the Philadelphia Fairmount Park system, the green space along the Schuylkill River (accessible from the East River and the West River Drives), day-camp at Raven Hill Academy, girl-scout hikes through rather scrubby terrain, and most magical and unmanicured and free-natured of all, the New Jersey seashore.  Still, my major life-experience was urban.  Concrete was the name of the game, with the exception of the most magical of sentinels: the trees along our city streets.  I absolutely and literally adored the trees.

But I had a true 'green epiphany' at twenty, when I visited a commune near Wilbur Mills, New Hampshire for two weeks that turned into a year in New England. 

I'd never seen anything like it: the interior of the third-cutting forest, where summer's broad sunlight penetrated the young thick-growing trees only as a most magical greenish light, reflecting from the forest floor in a network of criss-crossing rivulets.  I've never seen a photograph that could capture it.  In fact, I've never seen it anywhere else but in that particular patch of lichen-splotched, spring-green-leafed trees off a single-lane road in New Hampshire....

redwood candles

Knowledge lights the human path

/ since time forgotten  /

redwood remembers

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Berkeley is a city dedicated to Knowledge (capital K). 

It seems fitting that its blue skies should be incandesced by the tops of redwood trees.  These are among the largest and most ancient of our oldest pre-flowering plants, and connect us to a primeval past, which can be inchoately felt in their presence.  They link us to the time when our voyage through the oceans of knowledge was just beginning.

A Russian friend of mine who studied with a russian shaman in her youth, tells me that most trees will 'commune' with you, but not redwoods.  Their special gift is longevity, and they will share this 'knowledge' or perhaps better-said, this 'skill' with you, if you know how to approach them.  This was her own discovery, I suppose, as she continues on here in north america with the work she began in Russia.  Anyway, it's an aside, but perhaps a reflection of a particular 'ocean of knowledge,' namely knowledge of the arcane / knowledge of energy, rather than literate knowledge or knowledge of technological skill. 

These beautiful redwood candles are visible all over Berkeley, sometimes on almost every block in some neighborhoods.  Here are just a few from mine.  You've seen one on the 4th of July post, and this one is a few blocks away.  The one below is behind my 96-year old friend's house.