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.

Breach

Yesterday I received notice of a data breach from a healthcare company whose name I didn't know, but which apparently worked together with some I do... not that uncommon a thing these days, alas. I've confirmed nothing untoward appeared in my bills and extended the complimentary subscription to an identity theft protection site I'm already enjoying thanks to an earlier breach... Reassured to learn I could get assistance in dozens of languages!!

Five trees

In "Religion of Trees" today, students encountered religious studies for the first time. We've read things about tree veneration, etc., but mostly by botanists of various stripes, and students have formed teams to research the Bodhi tree, the trees in the Garden of Eden, and Yggdrasil. So I thought we were ready for my standby crash-intro to the field, "Religion: What is it, who gets to decide, and why does it matter?” the opening essay in Whitney Bauman et al 's Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology. 

The essay - which is followed by a parallel essay on "ecology: What is it, who gets to decide, and why does it matter? -" offers a nice introduction to religious studies for non-specialists. Before introducing (and complicating) the distinction between insider and outsider perspectives of theology and religious studies, it goes through five punchy definitions of religion, from Paul Tillich, D. T. Suzuki, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Judith Butler. The discussion are inevitably compressed but between them they raise key questions about religion, even before the "who gets to decide and why does it matter?" questions raise questions about authority and the politics of knowledge. It does a lot with a little!

Maybe a bit too much for my first years, just a month into college! I found myself having to explain the separation of church and state and how, despite the Supreme Court's distinction between teaching and studying religion, most Americans learn nothing about religion in school - except maybe that it's a difficult subject to talk about, or maybe something you just can't talk about. The definitions showed that you could, the discussion surfacing a variety of views about whether religion was a good or bad thing for individuals or societies. But what counts as religion and are all religions the same? I got a bit farther by triangulating from the idea that multiple definitions are better than one, each bringing into focus a different aspect of reality and together allowing you access to depths beyond any one view, and the argument that you don't know what language is until you know more than one. Are there things even about one's own religion (if one has one) that one cannot understand without looking beyond it?

I needed to leave time for the research teams to work together (it emerged they had not done any work yet...), but our closing drawing session allowed a kind of coda to the discussion. The prompt: five trees.

Thanks for being a voter!

I haven't mentioned it but we are of course once again in an election season, the most scarily apocalyptic yet. I feel like I'm channeling the ghost of more civil elections past in hand-writing postcards to registered voters in Colorado simply thanking them for being a voter and urging them to remind their family and friends to make time to vote, too. (Okay, so they're registered Democratic voters...!)

Trees, the inside story

 

 

 

 

The folders at the NYPL Picture Collection introduced me to the amazing tree photographs of Lee Friedlander. I'm sure I'll be sharing many more, which I appreciate especially for resolutely refusing ever to show a whole tree from a distance. Branches are always overflowing at least three of the square pictures' four edges. This is from his 2008 Photographs: Frederick Law Olmsted Landscapes.

Pinking

Lace

 The leaf miners at at it again!

Classic!

One of the perks of living where we do is being able to cross the street to hear free concerts at the Manhattan School of Music. Tonight was the season kickoff for the graduate orchestra program, who knocked it out of the park with overpowering performances of Beethoven's Fifth (preceded by a short piece by Unsuk Chin written for his 250th birthday) and Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. Wow, wow!

Forest layer

How much gets lost when a forest burns, or is replaced by pastureland or crops like soy? Forests are three-dimensional, creating a layer of livable world not just along but high above the ground. This image, from the Brasilia National Forest two weeks ago, gives a sense...

Ahead of the curve

Tree diagrams

The Religion Of ...

I'm trying something new in "Theorizing Religion," to address the reality that most students have no background in the study of religion. For the past several years I had student teams audit Harvard Divinity School "World Religions through their Scriptures" MOOCs (Buddhism or Islam)m a kind of crash course they had to report to the class on over four weeks near the start of the semester. But those MOOCs aren't available anymore, at least not for auditing, so I had to think of something else. 

What we're trying this year, instead, also involves student teams giving a sequence of presentations to the class over multiple weeks based on out-of-class research. For the first week, they're to "look wherever you usually look when you want to find out about something" (online of course). For the next, they need to go to the NYU Library and explore the stacks to get a sense of what kind of academic work there is on their topic. For the third we'll either seek out native informants or endeavor comparisons - TBD. The rather naughty list of topics, designed to force reflection on theorizing religion? "The religion of Confucianism / Buddhism / Fashion / ISKCON / Neopaganism / Secularism." These images are from the first presentations.

Baobab profiles

Back in the Picture Collection at NYPL Little Prince. I've decided to make my way through all the Trees folders, but go as far only as Banana, Banyan and Baobab. More about the prodigious banyan soon. For now, some fruit of the baobab - enough to show that some photographers seek trees (and framings) that make the baobab's look as little like other trees as possible, while others, perhaps in response, show them looking very much like conventional deciduous trees. While some looked almost like the threatening baobabs of The Little Prince, one quite impressively managed to create a scene reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich!

PRRI

The latest PRRI American Values Atlas is out, with 2023 figures, charts and maps on religious diversity in the US.

 

It confirms the three big stories: that the US is becoming ever more religiously diverse, that the religiously unaffiliated continue to grow, especially among younger people, and that our politics is held hostage by an ever smaller group, white Evangelical Christians: just 13.4%?!

Buddhist-Daoist forest

A celebrated writer at Renmin University, in whose summer school I taught for a few years, was described to me as an international literary star. His works - dark satires of contemporary Chinese life - were not published in China, but somehow this didn't seem to be a problem. His newest novel (at least in translation) lampoons the program Renmin runs for leaders of China's five officially recognized religions. I've only read about a fourth of it so far, but it's savage. Grimly funny, too, and occasionally unexpectedly lyrical. Two main characters, a young Buddhist nun and a young Daoist priest, sort of fall in love, something she makes sense of through elaborate paper cuts imagining a relationship between the bodhisattva Guanyin and Laozi. Fascinating! But I didn't expect it might involve trees, too...!

Religious umami

This year's "Theorizing Religion" draws students from all over the university. I appreciated the wealth of passion and experience this brings when I asked them today, during a round of introductions today (we haven't seen each other in two weeks, because of the Labor Day holiday), to tell the class about another class they were enjoying this semester. I know our students (and curriculum) are wild but still wasn't prepared for this feast:

Multi-Disciplinary Calculus •• The Blues Aesthetic •• Marketing and Branding •• Dubied Machine Knitting •• Catholic Saints and their Cults •• Immersive Storytelling (Virtual Reality) •• American Dream Soundtrack •• Umami Studies •• Social Media Empires •• Advanced Screen Printing •• Philosophy and Tragedy •• The Politics of Wounds •• Fine Arts Thesis Workshop •• Woodworking •• Qualities of Water

I don't even know what many of these are! We learned that the "umami studies" class includes a mushroom foraging trip and a student kindly showed me the work she'd done with the Dubied knitting machine after class... But what a fun context for exploring implicit and explicit understandings of religion. 

(The images above are drafts for covers of a book on religion we came up with.)

Plant-blind Christianity

The Season of Creation has begun - a special liturgical concentration for the month of September which the Episcopal Diocese of New York joins many in other places and other Christian traditions in celebrating. It's an important idea, but the practice may need a little work. 

In church today, we said the first of three specially recommended Prayers of the People. Trees offer the main emblems of the season; see if you can spot them in the prayers:

Blessed God, whose love calls the whole creation into covenant with you, and who puts in our hands responsibility for the care of the earth and its creatures: we pray for all to whom you have given life and being, saying, “Merciful God, keep your planet and people in peace.”

[I] For the well-being of the earth; for its resources of water, air, light, and soil, that they may be tended for the good of all creatures, we pray: Merciful God, keep your planet and people in peace.

[II] For the waters of the earth; for their careful use and conservation, that we may have the will and the ability to keep them clean and pure, we pray: Merciful God, keep your planet and people in peace.

[III] For the mineral and energy resources of the planet, that we may learn sustainable consumption and sound care of the environment from which they come, we pray: Merciful God, keep your planet and people in peace.

[IV] For the animals of the earth, wild and domestic, large and very small, that they may know the harmony of relationship that sustains all life, we pray: Merciful God, keep your planet and people in peace.

[V] For the creatures of the earth who do us harm and those whose place in your creation we do not understand or welcome, that we may see them as beloved creatures of God, we pray: Merciful God, keep your planet and people in peace.

[VI] For all who shape public policies affecting the planet and its creatures [especially _____ ], that they may consider wisely the well-being of all who come after us, we pray: Merciful God, keep your planet and people in peace.

[VII] For all those engaged in conservation, in agriculture and ranching, in aquaculture and fishing, in mining and industry, and in forestry and timber-harvesting, that the health, fruitfulness, and beauty of the natural world may be sustained alongside human activity, we pray: Merciful God, keep your planet and people in peace.

[VIII] For the creatures and the human beings of your world who are ill, or in danger, pain, or special need [especially _____ ], and for all who suffer from the unjust, violent, or wasteful use of the earth’s resources or their devastation by war, that all may one day live in communities of justice and peace, we pray: Merciful God, keep your planet and people in peace.

[IX] For the gifts of science and technology and for those who practice these skills, that they may be wise, visionary, and compassionate in their work, we pray: Merciful God, keep your planet and people in peace.

[X] For the creatures and the people of the earth whose lives and deaths have contributed to the fruitful abundance of this planet [giving thanks especially for _____ ], we pray: Merciful God, keep your planet and people in peace.

The Presider concludes the Prayers with a suitable collect.

Did you find the trees? They're not there, nor any of their plant relations! We get animal and mineral but not vegetable. The plant-blindness seems almost wilful. We recall the earth's resources of water, air, light, and soil, that they may be tended for the good of all creatures [I], but, while light and soil matter especially for our plant kin, the only creatures mentioned in these prayers are animals [IV, V]. (It's another problem that human beings are distinguished from creatures [VIII], but at least we're mentioned.)

The existence of plants is clearly implied in VII, as it calls to mind agriculture as well as forestry and timber-harvesting (trees!), practices which should be so engaged in as to sustain the health, fruitfulness, and beauty of the natural world. But the natural world (like the environment in III) is just backdrop, an echo of the ordering of plants to providing food for all animals in Genesis (1:29). The failure to even acknowledge plants in themselves is most patent in the final prayer [X], which bids us reflect on the creatures and the people of the earth whose lives and deaths have contributed to the fruitful abundance of this planet. Had plants been mentioned before we might think that creatures here eminently includes them - there is no animal life without plant death, none! - but I don't think they're there. They're the and of the earth and its creatures.

I'm surprised how disappointed I am by this, a call to revere the harmony of relationship that sustains life [IV] that makes relationship with plants unthinkable. The history of Christian denigration of the other-than-human is clearly not over. Maybe I should take a more positive attitude. Recognition of animals as kin is already a huge step (though there's still that distinction between creatures and human beings to work through). More steps await!

* * *

[Update 22/9: I mentioned my bemusement to our rector, who subtly amended the prayers in response. [I] now runs

For the well-being of the earth; for its resources of water, air, light, PLANTS and soil, that they may be tended for the good of all creatures, we pray...

[II], [III], [V], [VII] and [IX] are skipped in the interest of time, and to allow for more local prayers of the congregation. But [X] is amended:

For ALL THAT LIVES ON THE EARTH, AND EVERY BEING whose lives and deaths have contributed to the fruitful abundance of this planet, we pray...

Deftly done! (Since adding to the already too long list wasn't an option.) I found myself making an ad hoc amendment of my own:  

Merciful God, keep your PLANTS and people in peace.]

Cornucopiae

Before the semester moves into full swing, I took the chance to check out the Open Orchard on Governors Island (a place I confess I'd not been before) and the Picture Collection at the New York Public Library. The orchard is the brainchild of sculptor Sam Van Aken, who has for several years been grafting "Trees of 40 fruit," bringing together on one stem huge varieties of stonefruits. For Governors Island he's supervising an "orchard" of fifty trees which represent two hundred varieties of native and imported apricots, plums, peaches, nectarines, cherries and apples.

I write about grafting in my book but my experience with grafting has been all books (and videos). This was a chance to see grafting in person, raised to the level of public art. It confused me in all the right ways. "In person" - how many persons is it when a tree sports branches of such different provenance? Was this a wonder or a horror? 

Grafting has been the way fruit has been grown for millennia; the Encyclopédie reported it was known as le triomphe de l'art sur la nature. Aken's Governors Island trees preserve species (and share fruit) from varieties long forgotten or abandoned by agriculture, and the human worlds, tracing from far and near, which cherished them. 

It's late in the year, so I spotted only two fruits (neither ripe yet), but at other times these trees will sport many colors of flowers, and many shapes and sizes of fruit. How ... bizarre. And yet, seeing these with the southern tip of Manhattan in the distance, it was impossible not to see them as representing the American experiment. Better than melting pot, better than salad bowl. I wasn't expecting that but was quite moved.

 

The NYPL's Picture Collection is something else again, files of images clipped from books and magazines going back over a century (they started in 1915), organized by subject. I'd sent an inquiry indicating my interest in trees but wasn't prepared for the shelves of files, sorted by tree species. There's a generic Trees file (one of three, the others stored in another room), too - coming right after the fat file on Treehouses! 

There may or may not be bibliographical information available for the images, but the point is to encounter them as images, indeed as part of a windfall of pictures - the Picture Collection is beloved or artists, designers and others in search of inspiration. Quite different from, or perhaps a different kind of, research! And what fun! I leafed through the first of the generic Tree files as well as the two on Trees - Oaks. Educational texts and advertising, photography and art, wall papers and even butter molds... Will be back for more.