In Religion of Trees today, we delved into Stephanie Kaza's incredibly embodied Buddhist practice-buoyed Conversations with Trees: An Intimate Ecology, noting how tactile her encounters were, starting with "extend[ing] a shy hand" in response to an alder's invitation.
I am simply trying to say hello across the barriers of form and language. I believe the hands communicate this intention most honestly. The voice and mind are not direct enough. Or perhaps they are too complex for the first step of making contact. Besides, the tree and I have such different minds and voices. I don't know the language of these alders at all. I can only guess at the shape of a tree's mind and what it knows about life on the edge of a pond. (Boulder: Shambalah, [1993] 2019), 25
Connected by touch she discovers affinities in respect to water, light and rhythms... In further chapters I assigned, Kaza's hands dip into a manzanita's magnetic energy, stack a woodpile and even operate a chainsaw. So of course our drawing prompt was "a human touching a tree," which students took in terrifically different directions.
After class one student lingered and asked me what tree first touched me, sparking my interest in this subject, and a parried. The Lang courtyard maples, of course. But there must have been others, deeper in my past. By happy coincidence a Facebook group I don't remember joining called "Trees of life" today shared this 1907 painting by Koloman Moser which sang to me. The scene looked familiar, and indeed it is: a view of the Raxalpe, a place we often went when our family lived in Vienna. The Rax is above the treeline but to get there (or if you walk down, having taken the ropeway up) you have to travel through the verdant worlds so beautifully depicted here. Couldn't not share!
