As I move closer to engaging the many others who write about religion and trees (though none in the way I do) I'm finding it a little hard to avoid sounding peevish. It's not that they're wrong, though I think their views are often naive, but they're going about things the wrong way. (But I really don't like criticizing people...)
Above is a spread from Hannah Fries' Being with Trees: Awakening Your Senses to the Wonders of Nature, a lovely little collection of poems and photographs and contemplative prompts I just got which invites readers to a real or vicarious "forest bathing" experience; it has a foreword by one of my heroes - Robin Wall Kimmerer - and is blurbed by another - David George Haskell. Its premise and promise:
Being in the woods doesn't just feel good but is, in fact, good for you.* (North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 2022), 15
and you can experience this whether you are in a city park, town trail system, state forest, national park or private woodland (22). Apparently human beings have always known of the solace and comfort of trees, have always known what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:
"In the woods we return to reason and to faith." (19)
But, I want to say peevishly, is that true? One doesn't have to take Robert Pogue Harrison's view that forests are the uncanny other to civilization (itself rather a modern take) to wonder at this sanitized experience of safety and escape from human cares. Isn't the very premise here that we are guests in the world of trees, an assumption that distinguishes us from most of our ancestors? In ways it's taking me pages to enumerate, we are so estranged from the natural world that relationship with trees seems optional. It's definitely better to opt for them than against them, of course! But so much of the tree-lovers' enthusiasm takes separation for granted that real relationship can't really be imagined - the kind of relationships trees have with other species, including, for much of our short history, human beings.
As the trees breathe out, you breathe in; as the trees breathe in, you breathe out. (27)
This is well and good, but the real relationship - a pretty damn lopsided relationship - between us and trees is fleshy, not just airy. More honest acknowledgment of dependence and the difficulty of reciprocity is needed.
Verlyn Klinkenborg makes a similar point with the same words of Emerson:
Only in 1836, when most of the land around Concord, Massachusetts, had been cleared, could Emerson say, “In the woods, we return to reason and faith.”
Klinkenborg distinguishes between the solace offered by individual trees, who echo our own loneliness, and the quite different experience of forests, with whom human beings - especially settler colonists in North America - had had an adversarial relationship. (There are no Native Americans in Klinkenborg's story, alas.)
The literature of forest-fear is endless, and it plucks at something ancestral and still fresh within us. In the forest we feel the power of scale—and perhaps the power of time—almost too vividly. We shrink within ourselves, growing smaller and smaller as the forest grows deeper and taller.
"The Lone Tree Forest," in Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, Wise Trees (Abrams, 2017), 11, 10
Being with Trees acknowledges this feeling of smallness and even threat, but glosses it as the Romantics' sublime.
What place makes you feel both awed and a little fearful at once? (173)
Really, we learn, trees and forests want us to feel good, as connected to all things as as they are. They offer us healing. And the right response is wonder, gratitude, joy! But don't stop there:
Let us choose joy, but let's not stop there. Let your joy and wonder also move you to reverence. As you walk in the woods, think of the ground you walk on as sacred. Make a little mental nod to all the life you encounter, acknowledging each thing as its own small miracle. (179)
Although the trees may offer healing, we will not be fully healed until we, in turn, begin to heal the wounds we have inflicted on our landscapes. We can honor the trees and the earth with our wonder and our reverence, knowing that this is the foundation of a new relationship of reciprocity. (181)
How could I not love this? Especially as the last words are Kimmerer's?
"We are dreaming of a time when the land might give thanks for the people." (185)
I've experienced, gratefully, all the kinds of rapture this book celebrates. And yet it all still seems antiseptic to me, touristic. Wonder and reverence seem too easy, too distant. Redolent of the National Park motto "Take only photographs, leave only footprints." This is indeed how to be a good guest, but not how to be at home in a forest, to be in real relation with its other citizens. Care for the environment is needed, lots of it, but what kind of "new relationship of reciprocity" can come from a wonder and reverence that thinks we can and should leave no footprint?
By footprint I'm meaning, I think, our taking more from trees than a sense of peace and connection or even their generously sweet shade. It's taking their nuts and leaves, taking their sap and bark and, often, taking the whole thing. Animals cannot live without consuming plants, and human society depended on trees for everything from shelter to heat to medicine. The history of human culture is the history of fire, and every fire ever lit consumed wood. (More recently, fossilized wood.)
We can't just amble into a forest and sing
Getting to know you,
Getting to know all about you.
Getting to like you ,
Getting to hope you like me.
Getting to know you,
Putting it my way, but nicely,
You are precisely
My cup of tea!
Getting to know you,
Getting to feel free and easy.
When I am with you,
Getting to know what to say.
Haven’t you noticed?
Suddenly I’m bright and breezy
Because of all the beautiful and new
Things I’m learning about you
Day by day.
Okay, so that's a little peevish (and a little unfair to The King and I, which is wise to the difficulty of relationships)!! But I feel like saying: we're not strangers to trees, nor they to us. And they know that no living thing subsists on wonder and reverence.
So, to go back to that spread at the top (here it is again), they might
share my sense that there's a level of self-deception here which doesn't
bode well for a true relationship of reciprocity.
These pages come in the book's first section, "Breathe." (The others are "Connect," "Heal" and "Give Thanks.") Invoking Thich Nhat Hanh is always a good thing in my book. There are ways in which labeling our breathing in and out can attune us deeply to things, within and without, and slow walking is a great way to become aware. It can in some mysterious way heal the world. But this invocation comes after several pages of suggestions for ways of opening ourselves to the otherness of trees and overcoming it through a kind of interpenetrating identification. One of the most basic othernesses of trees is that they aren't mobile, as we are: they don't walk. They breathe, perhaps even
breathe in and think of being rooted, like a tree; breathe out, and think of being light, like a leaf in the wind
but if they think I am solid, that I am free, it's a completely different freedom than an animal's. If they could see this book, they might see the picture telling a different, truer story than human-tree communion: human boots pausing on a tree stump. It's a lovely stump. The lichen on it even makes it look a little (to human eyes) like a view through a forest! But the human pretending to be a tree, however softly she's stepping, is taking the place of a tree, before continuing on her merry way.
Now this book doesn't deny the difference between sessile trees and mobile humans but it never takes it really seriously. In fact it quotes one of my long-favorite tree poems, by Robert Frost, (70-71, in its second section, "Connect"), which is all about the difference... but moves on without really hearing what it's saying. (I'm surprised I haven't posted this poem in this blog; I will sometime soon, and try to articulate what I think it's saying that Being with Trees doesn't get.)
*Actually Fries acknowledges, in her acknowledgments: Also, I am aware that not everyone is comfortable and happy in the forest, and I am deeply grateful that I grew up with the privilege and opportunity to play and wander freely and safely in the woods. (188)
