Chop chop

After a bit of a hiatus, drawing is back in "Religion of Trees." Today's class was a working our way through representative chapters from Stephanie Kaza's wonderful Buddhist Conversations with Trees. (I might have time later to tell you how this provided the perfect text for approaching a more general first year seminar topic: how to read a book - and why.) 

The last of the chapters I'd selected, "Cutting Wood," narrates her experience stacking and then cutting wood for her fire - with a chainsaw! Kaza's reflection is framed in terms of a koan: "What is my relationship with wood?" I was going to have us take time to write on this ourselves, but the clock ran out. Instead, I made the prompt for our drawing just "wood." Assorted relationships are examined and unexamined here. (The recursive one at top left is by yours truly.)

Ethically sourced

"Theorizing Religion" did the AMNH "Asian Peoples" galleries one better today. After we shared our generally very critical appraisals of the layout, contents and language of the gallery - indeed its very appearance in a museum of natural history! - I said: Suppose they said "We hear you. This exhibition is an embarrassment. We're taking it down. Give us some ideas for what we could do with that space to offer a better understanding of religion." 

Folding in what we had deemed most powerful about the less problematic Northwest Coast Hall as well as themes from our class discussions on what's excluded in definitions of "world religions" and even "religion," one group kept the architecture of the existing gallery but transformed it in a most marvelous way!

Tree growth!

Very pleased to discover, in the NYBG bookshop, that that tree-formed "History of Existing Life" we critically analyzed in "Religion of Trees" has been updated! No longer is the highest point a monkey, hanging from a branch but seemingly pointing upward - continuing the vertical thrust of the whole tree - beyond the rings representing historical epochs ... presumably towards us, the tree-drawers! Now there's an additional ring, and within it, from our own branch, a flying lemur and, highest of all, from a neighboring branch, an anteater! Kudos!

Fall wallpapers

 

Autumn colors at NYBG

Spectral tree

Checked out that London Plane with no northerly branches we learned from the New School Forest archive was "holding the memory of its dead neighbor." It is indeed without branches or branch scars on that side, testimony to the larger and older neighbor. And the neighbor's stump is indeed still there, just beyond the wrought iron fence, a little hard to make out beneath a bird bath in some shrubbery. From across the street you can almost sense the shape of the missing giant - a hole in the canopy of the New School forest!

Stumped by the Archives

Took the Religion of Trees students to the University Archives today, to learn about "New School Forest," the census of 340 trees growing on blocks with New School buildings conducted by photography faculty Matthew Lopez Jensen for an art project for the 2019 centennial. Each of these trees has a card on which someone's drawn a picture, sketched the tree's shape, noted the environs, signs of damage and custodianship, and general observations. The street numbers nearest them are recorded too, but since there's no clear sequence to the archive, we were unable to find most of the trees we'd gone in looking for. (Last class, students were tasked with choosing two trees on our block, sketching them, and noting down the nearest house number.) Even when we did, students registered no epiphanies. "That doesn't look like my tree" was at best a surprise, not a research question.

This was a little disappointing, especially as I was having an epiphany of my own - and also one triggered by not finding what I was looking for. The archivists had brought out most of the tree-related items they'd offered me when I was assembling my "New School Trees" zine last year, including the large plan for a garden behind The New School's main building from September, 1950 (above). The archivist who was our host pointed out that the plan was by one "J. J. Levison M. F." which she presumed meant Master Forester. (It does.) 

I'd wondered last year whether this garden had ever been built; if so it would have been a casualty of the 1956 extension which created the courtyard we now know. This time we had a likely way to find out: a folder of correspondence with J. J. Levison from 1948-1960. Progress on the garden would surely be documented here!

None was, so this was likely a proposal never enacted. (For what it's worth, though, the three "existing trees" marked in the plan were real.) But when the archives close a door they invariably open a window. From the correspondence folder it became clear that Jacob Joshua Levison was not only a Master Forester (trained at Yale) but the instructor of a beloved course which had been running at The New School since 1941.

 

In the Spring 1950 catalog, it was the very last course listed:

There's correspondence about a 1951 iteration - maybe one longer field trip instead of three? - but the course seems not to have run again. The garden sketch was in effect a parting gift after a decade's teaching at The New School. The course was evidently fondly remembered, and in November, 1959, our long-time president Alvin Johnson said a few words when Levison received an award for City College alumni; the next day he penned a letter of thanks and appreciation, apologizing for not having said all he wished to:

You are a tree, Jack Levison. A tree is always beautiful, in its spring leafage and in its full summer foliage, in its autumn color and its bareness after frost, revealing the consummate design of its branching and the noble strength of its trunk.

The tree is the only living thing that keeps its beauty in old age; indeed reaches its highest beauty then. The tree, and some few mortals like Jack Levison.

Perhaps it was too much to expect these students, barely halfway through their second month of college, to delight in the way evidence can disconfirm our expectations and invite us to discover things we hadn't imagined! Into such gaps questions and research can grow!

But perhaps one of the New School Forest cards I lingered over with them - 7 West 11th Street, next to the churchyard of First Presbyterian - may have left a trace, opened a space... 

Amazing example of a L[ondon] P[lane] holding the memory of its dead neighbor, an oak in the churchyard that was cut down; no branches on north side because of the oak which is now a stump.

We'll go check on that tree when I see them next, and on its unforgotten neighbor.

Roundtable!

Religious Studies Roundtables are back! Join us a week from today for a chance to hear the faculty teaching our courses in Hebrew Bible, Catholic Saints and Islam discuss their own exciting research!

Never logged

Charmed hike in the horizonless Pigeon Lake Wilderness.

Dacks

 

Wonders high and low

Suddenly fall

Way back when we were making plans for the fall, we were able to book the place in the Adirondacks we last saw in May. It seemed a long time off, and even hitting the road for it yesterday it seemed much too early. Fall? Leaves? New York City's trees are drying out a bit, but it's felt like a protracted late summer. Once we crossed the Hudson and started driving up the Palisades, the reality of autumn started to hit. Honey locusts flushing yellow, vines reaching for magenta, and maples golden and orange and even red. The show continued through the Catskills, but further wonders awaited. The New York Foliage Report predicting the 'Dacks would be at peak but, while many trees are still flush with green, it feels like we might even be a little past peak, at least higher up.

If I wasn't ready for the leaves, I also wasn't ready for fall. Heading north in this season always fast-forwards the season in a jarring way, allowing a wanted or wanted sneak peak of what is to come, soon corrected when we head back, but this time I felt almost affronted. I wasn't ready for this! I didn't need (or deserve) a holiday yet - we're just six weeks into the semester. And the terrifying debacle of the election, surely it's not just a month away?! Eventually, though, the lyricism of the changing colors got to me. 

The spectacle of fall foliage continues to confound me with feelings I can't parse - though I'm getting there! It's odd, as I remarked last year, for humans to trek out to these forests only to see the end of something, as though this were the goal, not the byproduct of winding up. But I've had the chance to spend more time with deciduous forests this year than ever before (though the fate of the forest I saw dance into spring in North Carolina is unclear...), including up here. With a few exceptions, every leaf I was seeing will have been new to me, new since last year. 

 Didn't Simon and Garfunkel sing about this? 

Hello, hello, hello, hello

Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye

That's all there is

And the leaves that are green turn to brown ...

 

But that's not quite what I'm feeling (though I wonder now about the residues left by hearing this song in my Southern California childhood!). I feel I know these trees a little better. Yes, these leaves are being released to their next mission, as have countless generations of leaves past. Their work is not done, or maybe their work but not their contribution. In a new piece, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of fallen cedars but what she says applies to everything in the forest: 

As inert as the logs seem, there is a ferment of activity inside, like dreams moving inside the head of a sleeper. … When the tree was alive, most all of the cells in the trunk of the tree were dead. They were just empty tubes designed to hold up the tree and to transport water. But now that the tree is dead, it is more alive than ever before.

The very soil beneath our feet is sublimed leaf litter. Since last fall I've got a deeper sense that the forest is a circle, nothing lost or squandered. We see only some of it, and value even less.

Natural history of religion

Invited my Theorizing Religion students to join me at the American Museum of Natural History to marvel at just how much religion is on show in their galleries of non-western cultures. In a natural history museum?! 

The absence of galleries on, um, white people is damning. (In fact it would be hard to find a better illustration of the things we've been reading about in Tomoko Masuzawa and Sylvia Wynter, the racialization of non-western cultures as "natural" phenomena whose pith is religion.) But Christianity sneaks in, in the little vitrine in the "Asian Peoples" gallery devoted to Georgians, a minority tradition barely worthy of description.

Tree planting

Had the great pleasure today of leading the Adult Forum at Church of the Ascension on "Trees and the Sacred." It was nice not just to share my thinking with a new audience, but to do so at the place where the original seed for the whole project may have been planted. It was at one of their Sunday evening Services of Meditation and Sacrament years ago that I first heard Thomas Merton's words 

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree...

Since Ascension, like our church, has been using the special Prayers of the People distributed as part of this month's Season of Creation, I built our discussion around that. We started a round of self-introductions - include "a special tree, a particular tree or tree species" - which elicited all manner of tender stories of relationships with trees. (Recalling that the Anishinaabe call trees "the standing people"I quipped that we'd more than doubled the number of people in our room.) Then I passed out a copy of the Prayers and asked people to find the trees in it. There are none, of course, though "forestry and timber-harvesting" are mentioned. "Indirectly they're everywhere," someone protested.

I told them of my distress at discovering the unspoken taking for granted of plants and trees, but also offered a way forward. Turns out these prayers were written about ten years ago, and it's only in these past ten years that our minds have been opened to trees in a big way: Braiding Sweetgrass (2015), The Hidden Life of Trees (2016), The Overstory (2019), In Search of the Mother Tree (2021). Were someone crafting those prayers this year, I suggested, of course they'd include the trees!

I used this as a way of arguing we're at a turning point in our relationships with trees, and not the first. For most of human history, our relationship could be characterized as one of dependence - which calls forth gratitude and care, but, human relationships suggest, anxiety and dissembling too. Next came distance - the forgetting of our constant needy interactions with trees made possible by fossilized trees, although we think of them just as minerals, and start to imagine human life as separate and separable from the rest of life. That illusion of distance is what makes it possible to encounter trees as our introductions had showsn us we do, as unexpected friends, silent witnesses and special companions. Our resonance with trees surprises and delights us because we have forgotten we're in deep relation already. The new phase I called shared destiny, and it partakes both of the growing sense of kinship which work of the last decade has helped us see and feel, and the Anthropocene reality that the consequences of our actions (mainly fueled by fossilized trees!) have created a new and shared precarity for tree people and human people.

We finished back with the Prayers for the People: I invited people to amend them, to "plant trees" in the text, whether by changing or adding words or adding a whole new section. Folks came up with a variety of brilliant ways to do so, corresponding to different understandings of the role of trees in creation. "Creatures" should be replaced with a phrase evoking all the forms of life on earth. Trees and plants make a mineral world livable for animals. Trees, givers of life and beauty, merit our thanks and care. What a delight!

And what fun to be in a church, where, instead of presenting my views in a neutral, secular, implicitly naturalistic way, I could be theological. For instance observe that the discovery of plant intelligence has made clear that ours is just one kind of intelligence - an argument I rehearsed in class two weeks ago - and then add that this might allow us to "triangulate" in theological ways. Or share my experience with the wood of the simple cross used in the Good Friday service, since the cross was the most intimate witness of Christ's passion...

Hope I have further chances to tap into the religion of trees of more congregations!

Surface tension

Overflow

Reels, a TikTok-analog which appears uninvited on my Facebook page and throws images at me some algorithm feeding on I'd-rather-not-know-what thinks will capture my interest, has recently been showing me much footage of flooding disasters around the globe. Some of it's fake, or mislabeled, but the destructive power of water is abundantly clear as it careens over precipices, overflows riverbeds, undermines foundations and trees and hillsides, washes away cars and bridges and houses and worse... 

I might be seeing some soon from the very area we spent April in in Western North Carolina, all of whose roads are de facto closed because of flooding or fallen trees from Hurricane Helene.

Sacred space

After twenty inspired and inspiring years, the Rubin Museum of Art is closing October 6th. I went for a farewell visit today, appreciating their final exhibition's characteristically lovely way of activating their collection. Contemporary Himalayan artists were invited to respond to particular objects from the collection, which were then exhibited near the new work (or in a few cases, the new with the old). 

(Works by Pema "Tintin" Tshering, Charwei Tsai, Jasmine Rajbhandari)

Their curation has always been remarkable, allowing intimate and deeply meaningful encounters with art that is, after all, religiously charged, and this was no exception. They're making the best of closing, inviting us to share their excitement about becoming a "global museum" - a virtual museum? traveling exhibits? But these re-encounters with the collection - like this exquisite 13th/14th century Nepalese Avalokitesvara - made the loss of this museum even sadder.

I learned much of what I think I know about museum curation from a relationship with the Rubin which has included countless class visits and collaborations - click the tag "Rubin Museum of Art" at the bottom of this post for many such edifying episodes, including the one, in 2011, from which Atta Kim's melting ice Buddha at the top of this post hails. 

Looking back on it I'm reminded of the wisdom, including wisdom about traditions of accepting and even welcoming change, that the museum has always offered. Asha Kama Wangdi has filled the six-storey stairwell of the museum with a column of discarded prayer flags, known as "wind horses," and crafted actual horses emerging from them. Maybe their work is done in this space.

There has always something terrifically embodied about the experiences they offered, engaging all the senses, the space, and the feelings we bring and take from it, and this final show is no exception. 

In the Tibetan Shrine Room, their most immersive space, there's a piece of broken concrete with the words PLEASE TOUCH. It's a work by John Tsung called "神代/Divine Generation" and it quivers. It's a fragment from the foundation of the building, and has been wired up with 1000 feet of cables, inscribed with the Heart Sutra, which encircle the museum's walls and stairwells like a nervous system, or prayer beads. Touching it you feel the vibrations of people moving through the whole building. How lovely, how deep! I can feel that tingle in my hand even now.

One more work, which also allows us to accept the passing of the museum, at least in this form, itself a response to the Shrine Room. Kunsang Gyatso's "Goddess of Tangerine," we learn, suggests an alternate universe in which tangerines are worshiped because of their extinction ... us[ing] the dried tangerines to metaphorically visualize time and impermanence ... I'm not sure if Gyatso has Thich Nhat Hanh's tangerine meditation in mind. In any case, it's witty, allows us to acknowledge the unthinkability of loss (could tangerines disappear?!) while conjuring hope through its beauty. 

Thank you, Rubin Museum, for two decades of wonder.