Introduction
Ch 1 - Under the Bo Tree
Ch 2 - Hope in a Tree
Ch 3 - Trees of Life/Life of Trees
Ch 4 - The World's Oldest Religion?
Ch 5 - Tree Wonder
Conclusion
Chapter titles are provisional, and will perhaps be supplemented by subtitles. But here's what seems to be coalescing under each of them. Each chapter has four sections, should surprise the reader with its juxtapositions, and should offer at least one aha moment redescribing something familiar in religion. The larger project should work that way too. Let's see if I can encapsulate the direction of each section in a single sentence!
Introduction
Trees have been religiously important for a long time but in the Anthropocene we would do well to reacquaint ourselves with the understandings connected to earlier ages' intimate personal relationships with trees, rather than the abstracted views of the capitalocene
Ch 1 - Under the Bo Tree
• Siddhartha Gautama achieving enlightenment seated beneath a tree makes sense to us but it matters what kind of tree it was; as we picture different Bodhi trees we communicate what we think enlightenment is.
• If you check Emojipedia, there's clearly a generic image of a tree - the kind of deciduous lollipop tree that beaned Newton.
• Buddha achieved enlightenment under a strangler fig, a kind of tree that grows down as well as up, multiplying trunks, often killing its original host; how does the image of enlightenment change if we picture him under - inside - such a tangle?
• In Buddhist tradition, Buddhas all achieve enlightenment beneath a tree, but different kinds; while all of them may have empty heartwood, they suggest we let the variety of trees expand our understanding of religion
[imagine if the God of Job had talked about trees!...]
Ch 2 - Hope in a Tree
• Theophany of Job's menagerie is the greatest nature poetry of Hebrew scriptures but Job's despair is that he's not like a tree, which grows back even when cut - but then he does
• Job's recovery is like coppice, an ancient practice of tree husbandry which actually prolongs life of trees; did aweful God coppice Job's family?
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, responding to students' inability to think of positive relationships of humans to nature, offers appreciation of ways humans can help the plants we live with flourish, recognition of a world where different peoples help and depend on each other
• Knowing, as Job writers did, about coppice, we might read other texts differently too: perhaps we should picture Adam and Eve in Eden with pruning hooks
Ch 3 - Trees of Life/Life of Trees
• However the tree of life was pictured before, Darwin changed it, though his careful use of the simile of a tree of life to represent the unity and history of species reminds us that trees grow through discarding branches (self-pruning!), glossed over in many contemporary trees of life
• Tree maps/diagrams are everywhere, because dendritic forms seem to be, but they conceal the realities of tree-like life Darwin still saw, suggesting completeness and balance and naturalizing hierarchy
• Predarwinian tree diagrams are clearly idealizations, achieving their form not through natural growth but through pruning and grafting
• Knowing about the graftability of trees, Christian scriptures look different, not just in the explicit discussions of grafting gentiles onto the rootstock of Israel, but even in Revelation's tree of life, which bears twelve kinds of fruit
Ch 4 - The World's Oldest Religion?
• As seen recently in Richard Powers' The Overstory, veneration of trees seems to be a human universal across cultures; e,g, ideas of a "world tree" are everywhere if you know they're there... but are they really?
• Western scholars claimed this ubiquitous practice as comparative religion came together in 19th century, though they noticed different things; perhaps no coincidence that trees become religious objects pointing beyond themselves as urbanized and colonial people lose the memory of trees as partners
• Baked into theories of ancient tree worship are ideas of the progress of spirit from animism through religion to science, a commitment to the vertical both culturally specific and unhelpfully world-rejecting; Diné trees of the four directions orient us here rather than pointing beyond this world
• What if we allowed the diversity of trees and human relationships with them to bring us back to earth?
Ch 5 - Tree Wonder
• Contemporary forms of tree religion see trees as timeless and fragile, social and symbiotic, better than us: Wohlleben, Simard-groupies etc
• They are good examples of what's been called the "dark green religion" emerging in our time, in both animist and Gaian forms...
• Danger of neo-primitivist nostalgia for an imagined time when we were merely the admirers and beneficiaries of trees; Anthropocene requires recognizing we can't abstract from nature
• Kimmerer's retelling of the SkyWoman story; world tree has blown over, we need to get to work rebuilding a world
Conclusion
Citizen pruners!
There's a lot here, and a lot not. My range of religious traditions is pretty narrow, for instance - Buddhist, biblical, Indigenous North American. While being comprehensive isn't good (or possible!) I'll try to graft more in as I go. Other open questions - whether to incorporate drawing exercises, whether to include first person experiences... But this feels like a coherent and interesting argument, at least to me! My thinking has really changed and come together in significant ways thanks to this time alone with it... and I'm only 1/3 of the way through the leave!