Trees, Time, and Passing By

Trees rarely make the front page.  That did happen, however, in 2004 when Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her Green Belt Movement begun in Kenya.  Knowing a bit about ecology, I was not surprised to hear about the physical side effects that resulted from that movement's planting trees, such as cleaner streams due to reduced soil erosion.  What intrigued me more were the intangible benefits those trees brought.  For example, friendships between Kenyan women developed because, as they made their daily trips in the hot sun carrying water, they stopped to converse in the shade of trees.

As I have reflected about trees in general, I've concluded that the most enduring intangible benefits trees bring derive from the way they serve as tabernacles of time.  Many species of trees can have life spans longer than ours can ever reach.  Trees, therefore, help families and communities hold onto life-giving memories from generation to generation.  That role trees can serve is made explicit in these lines from the early 20th-century poet Stephen Vincent Benet as he describes Richmond, Virginia:

"The trees in the streets are old trees used to living with people,

Family trees that remember your grandfather's name."

In Sequoia Natl. Park in California, I stretched my neck far back to look up at a tree that was young and growing long before Jesus was born.  Such pine trees and sequoias help us transcend our normal sense of time.  We usually think of time in terms of human generations, but that is subjective and human-centered. The 20th-century American Buddhist poet Gary Snyder speaks to the relativity of time scales in this way:

"As the crickets' soft autumn hum

is to us,

so are we to the trees

as are they

to the rocks and the hills."

Compared to many long-living species of trees, we humans are just passing by.  We are to them passers-by in time, similar to the way we pass by a tree beside the sidewalk or walking path. In countries where people do not get virtually all their food from the grocery story, people can also be more aware of the other, tangible benefits those trees provide.  The Hindu Upadesa Tarangini brings together those tangible benefits with trees' intangible reminder that we are passers-by in the following benediction placed upon a tree:

"Oh tree!  You are standing on the path.  Live for a long time and be happy, because with your blossoms the cuckoo is happy, and with your pollen the bumblebees are happy, and passers by are happy with your fruits.  So live long!"

~~~

Is there any tree in particular that you remember? What is your memory of it?

(The Snyder poem is taken from

Buddhism and Ecology, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker, et al., © 1997.)

(The Hindu blessing is taken from Hinduism and Ecology,
 by Ranchor Prime, © 1992.)