The writers of many of the other tree books of recent years, where they are not professional arborists or tree scientists, claim our attention through exotic travel, tree climbing, interviews with famous and less famous tree protectors and cultivators, or deep dives into relationships with trees, either of long standing or intensively. These tree book people read each other and, to some extent, write for each other too. Yes, I'd love to be one of them! But I haven't done what they have.
What I bring is somewhat different. I've read their books, but I also read lots of other kinds of books - including religious studies books. As importantly, I'm finding, I have developed a way of teaching this material that is playful and interactive. The "Religion of Trees" class, you'll recall, is watered by a shared practice of drawing. I used this in an AAR presentation two years ago, too, to enthusiastic response. In the book I'm including about twenty drawing prompts, at suitable moments in the unfolding of the argument. Readers are invited to draw not in a separate notebook but in the book itself. This is the first one:
As you picture the Buddha beneath a tree, what kind of tree do you see? Try drawing it.
A friend who's been reading the draft with me has been delighted to do each one, and I enjoy seeing his doodles and sketches in my binder of drafts. I love the thought that my book, if ever it gets published, will become a personally meaningful object to readers in this way. (In this I realize I'm drawing on something from very long ago, the way Rick Warren insisted that readers of The Purpose Driven Life write in the book to open a more personal and dynamic relationship with it.)
Why we're drawing isn't explained. If pushed I'd say I've learned it's meaningful through doing it in class. I'd explain that it can be a way of helping grasp and absorb ideas, a way of slowing down, a way of switching gears, a way of activating a more visual or lateral thinking, a way of surfacing and connecting to the gifts and questions each of us brings. It's effective if done once and exponentially more when it becomes a practice. It's also fun! My hope is that the reader will enjoy the feeling of having fun together with me, not the archetypal professor experience.
I hope that these invitations resonate with a way of moving through material that is playful, exploratory, occasionally digressive, rewarded by unexpected discoveries more than knock-down-drag-out demonstrations, open-ended. What I seem to be good at is finding connections between things others haven't thought related, and making them in suggestive rather than didactic ways. I love finding value in multiple viewpoints. (At one point I've written: "It’s not my intention to correct and replace but to contextualize and complement.")
All of this comes pretty easy, I'm finding, if I give myself permission. A little harder, or maybe just later in this process, is something else: speaking from my own experience, or constructively. Not just: people have had all these fascinating thoughts and experiences but I've had xyz experience or I think about things in this different way. It's not that I don't have experiences or opinions, but my Princeton religious studies training makes me leery of the claims to authority of first-personal experience. Also: who am I, what should it matter what I've found? My experiences with trees are pretty tame compared to those of some, including many of my students!
Still, it's coming to seem like a natural part of the voice which invites readers' participation and shared exploration of the experiences and traditions of others is sharing some of my own intimations and hopes. Never "so do this!" but some "maybe we could"? Or even, since I love providing new meanings and implications for received ideas, "maybe we are already..."
