Requiem for a Holy Tree

Arboricide. There really is such a word. It means “the wanton destruction of trees.” On December 8th, 2010 arboricide was committed against the legendary Thorn Tree of Glastonbury, the a tree that is said to have sprung from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea some two thousand years ago. The tree, whose ancestry has been traced to the Middle East, blooms during the seasons of Christmas and Easter. Each year on December 8th a sprig is cut from one of the tree’s descendants in St John’s churchyard and sent to the queen for her Christmas table. Whoever attacked the tree was likely familiar with the custom and chose the day accordingly. The Thorn Tree that stands—or stood—on Wearyall Hill was felled once before by Cromwell’s troops during England’s Civil war. The townspeople replanted the tree from cuttings, as they no doubt will again.


For the first arboricides, the tree was a symbol of Papist superstition—and perhaps also the wealth and privilege of the established religion. Whenever I hear the word Papist, I know the other “p” word, pagan, is just under the surface. The Cromwellians also made war on Maypoles, Beltane fires, observances of saints’ days, all the old customs that had been baptized and renamed by the Roman Catholic Church. Until the current arboricide is arrested, we can only speculate on the motive.

Some accounts call the arboricide an anti-Christian act which I think is unfortunate and inflammatory. The great thing about a holy tree is that no creed is required for veneration. Whether or not the tree sprang from Joseph’s staff and whether or not the staff was made from the wood of Jesus’s cross, the Glastonbury Thorn Tree is sacred because it is beloved, because it is a place of pilgrimage where people bring their troubles as well as their homage. It is sacred because it connects faith and myth, past and present, nature and miracle. It is sacred because it is a tree, with its roots in the earth and its branches in the sky, because it mediates those two worlds and draws sustenance from both, because, like all trees, it shows us how to do the same.

The veneration of trees pre-dates Christianity and no doubt all organized world religions. The tree is a source of life, offering shelter, food, habitat, fuel, soil preservation and enrichment—not to mention breathable air. In places where trees are scarce or land has been cleared, the tree is a gathering place, a landmark. In a world where we are losing forest at an alarmingly rapid rate, we would all do well to venerate trees, believers and atheists alike. No matter the motivation or beliefs of the arboricide, let’s not forget that it is a living tree that was attacked and living forests that continue to be at risk. May this loss awaken us to our deep-rooted, sacred connection with trees.

PS: For those of you waiting for news of Maeve, the revisions of Red-Robed Priestess are complete! I hope to announce the publication date soon.

virus warning re the amnesty site

My husband just went to the Amnesty link I provided in my last blog post and found a warning from google that some pages of the Amnesty site have been infected with a worm. I have not encountered this warning myself, but want to make sure I let people know there may be a problem.

Because I signed up to write for rights, I received an email from Amnest and am going to a particular page with case histories and addresses. I have not encountered a warning, but it is wise to be wary. Sad to think a cause can be undermined in this way.

Coming to Light

Chanukah begins at sundown on December 1, the beginning of what I call the Feasts of Light, the observances and celebrations that carry us through the darkest time of the year.

I am sure I am not the only one to note the coincidence of the recent WikiLeaks happening this same week, leaks that “bring to light” what people in power had every intention of keeping dark. Whatever havoc the revelations may wreak, and however questionable a character Julian Assange may be, I doubtless join many in believing this exposure of secrets is a good thing. What is revealed has a chance, at least, to be healed.

I confess I have fallen out of the blogosphere recently, because I find it daunting to be topical, to make intelligent, inspiring or thoughtful commentary on events I can barely keep up with. I comfort myself that I am doing what I can to save the earth—a particular bit of earth called High Valley. But I admit that though I sign petitions and call representatives on this and that, it is easy to lose sight of the rest of the world.

Today I committed to participation in Amnesty International’s Write for Rights December 4-12 writeathon. Their site provides you with all the information you need for writing letters on your own or for organizing a letter writing event.

The Write for Rights campaign is way of bringing to light the suffering of individuals, groups, and communities, suffering that may be unknown to many or deliberately distorted or obscured by those in power. It strikes me as a fitting way to honor this season.

Joyous Feasts of Light to all!

Just saying hello

I have not posted for awhile. I have nothing--or nothing new--to say about the elections or anything else topical or current. This is just a check in for this site only and not for the others where I usually cross post.

I don't want to forget the larger world, but my small one has been quite intense lately. My husband has had some health issues, which happily seem to be resolving. We finally decided what to do about High Valley  a year after my mother-in-law moved and a couple of months after her longtime tenants moved to the home they bought.

We are going to move to the house ourselves, live in the apartment the tenants have vacated and extend the activities of the center to the downstairs of Olga's house, which was, after all, a school and where her long wooden table can still seat at least thirteen. Then we can sell the house where we raised our children and put the proceeds towards preserving High Valley.

It seems such an obvious solution, more than one person asked why we didn't think of it before. There are reasons. Douglas was reluctant to move back to the scene of his childhood. And much as I admire and enjoy my mother-in-law, I frequently declared that I did not want to become her, that is someone in charge of a lot of buildings and contending with all the people who might inhabit them. I grew up in a rectory, and the idea of owning property is still strange to me. Yet I did grow up in the midst of community where rituals regularly took place. Not so different from High Valley. As for the land we are committed to preserving, Douglas and I both conceive of it as not belonging to us but to itself. It also finally dawned on me, that even if I live in what was Olga's house and tend the land she loved, I will still be myself. I will have the chance to go on loving land that I have loved since I was a sixteen-year-old high school drop out and maid-of-all-work living in a tree house on the hill across the pond, receiving nightly the kids who ran away from school till morning.

For all it makes sense in so many ways, the decision was made for me in this one moment:

Decided: Copper Beech in Autumn

it was the tree that did it
shining there, the sun’s
fire caught in its leaves
a tree that I could see
through my window every day
if I finally turn and meet my fate

So that's what's been happening. In the midst of everything, I am making steady progress with the revisions of Red-Robed Priestess. I hope to complete them by Winter Solstice. I don't have an official publication date yet, sometime next Fall. I will keep you posted.

Joyous Season of Feasts to all!

The Dead Do Vote and Not Just in Chicago

As the United States prepares for midterm elections (a phrase that recalls midterm exams and evokes much of the same anxiety) some of us are also preparing for Hallowe’en, the Eve of All Saints Day for Christians and for pagans, Samhain, a word that translates from Gaelic as Summer’s End. Many Mexican-Americans will celebrate Día de los Muertos. Though these holidays are culturally and historically distinct, they share the same time of year and many of the same customs, particularly the honoring of the dead, the acknowledgment of worlds and realities beyond our immediate ken.

However long term their effects, elections happen in the frenzy of a particular moment and climate, currently a desperate and divisive one. The holy days which precede this sacred, secular rite—the casting of the ballot—can offer a longer view, both comforting and profound in its perspective.

We are not just republicans or democrats, liberals or conservatives, moderates or extremists who have trouble finding or defining community. We are part of the great communion that embraces the living, the dead, and all who will come after us. Our ancestors—we share them if we go back far enough—have been rogues and heroes, courageous and cowardly, sung and unsung, hardworking and indolent, cruel and kind, mistaken and visionary. Ancestors are not just our blood kin, but the people whose beliefs, ideas, and creations have shaped us. Whether we know their names or not, they live in us as we will live in those who come after us, whether or not we have biological children. 

As part of the preparation for voting—and as incentive to vote—we might do well to contemplate this communion, invoke the wisdom of the ancestors to help us keep faith with the descendants.

The season itself reminds us of we are part of the cycle of birth, growth, decline, death, rebirth. The leaves fall and turn back into earth. The campaign signs (less attractive and harder to recycle) will blow away, too. The traditions of Hallowe’en give us a chance to play with our fears of death through costumes, games, and parades. And in our culture, which has been based on constant growth and productivity, we are especially frightened of decline and death. We do not want chickens to sleep at night or fields to lie fallow or oil and gas to stay underground. We are afraid of the dark.

Every year, just before another election, we have a chance to make to make friends with our fears, to know that we are and will be both dust and truth, that the mystery that gave rise to our little lives will receive us again with an embrace beyond our imagining.

Fairytales: One Antidote to Bullying

“Life is no fairytale,” people say, meaning there is a dearth of happy endings. But that last traditional line “and then they lived happily ever after” is not what the story is about. In most fairytales there are terrible perils and ordeals. The hero is often the victim of bullying and malevolence and must discover both internal and external resources in order to survive and ultimately triumph.

In many stories there are three sons or three daughters who in turn set off into the world to seek their fortune. Before any one of them has gone far, they encounter someone in need, an animal, a beggar, or an old man or woman. The hero is the one who stops to show kindness or to share whatever meager store of food he or she has. Later, in the time of trial, the act of kindness becomes a saving grace, and the animal or old beggar becomes a powerful ally. The bullies, or the ungenerous, generally come to a bad end, though sometimes the former victim chooses to help them and restore them to the human family. 

I grew up reading fairytales and then novels that were inspired by fairytales. I just missed the chance to read Harry Potter to my then teenaged children who read the book themselves and now and then read bits out loud to me. Unlike many adults, I never became a Potter aficionado, but it always makes me happy to see children lugging around huge books and losing themselves in long, imaginative stories of children who have to face danger and cruelty with bravery and wit.

I can’t help but wonder if lives have actually been saved because of stories, the lasting solace and courage people find in them. And I can’t help wondering if lives are being lost because people have no stories or are in the wrong story. Is the despair of victims and misfits more abject because they can’t foresee a reversal of fortune, feel bereft of allies, can’t conceive of themselves as heroes in disguise? Are the bullies more vicious for having no mirror held up to them, no warning of the consequences of cruelty to character and fate?

We are living in harsh times where fear and insecurity are increasing our human tendency to scapegoat and bully. The internet which, like any tool can be used for good or evil, has made it easier for people to be cruel anonymously and for the acts of cruelty to be more indelible. It’s bad enough to be taunted on the playground or in the cafeteria, but when cruelty can go viral, the victim must feel even more helpless, even more without a refuge. It should be noted that while anyone can be a victim for any reason, hatred of gay men and boys seems to be particularly virulent of late.

There is no one antidote to bullying. Schools are definitely on the frontline of response and my heart goes out to parents who must navigate the complex and treacherous worlds of social media. One of the most moving responses to the targeting of gay teens is Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project  where older gay and lesbian people tell their own stories of trial and ultimate triumph. Critics say the project does not go to the root of the problem or address some of the prejudices within the GLBTQ community. But I can imagine these stories acting as life lines to someone in the midst of what seems like hopeless, endless suffering.

We need to foster a culture of storytelling in schools, in community and religious centers: People of all ages telling stories, of all sexual orientations and ethnic, economic and religious backgrounds. We also need to foster the art of listening to a story, for in hearing another’s story we suspend fear and judgment and come to identify with the teller, no matter how different he or she appears to be. We need a curriculum in all schools that approaches literature as the healing art it can be. We need to rediscover stories as a source of courage, resourcefulness, and compassion.

Genetically Modified Salmon: Can this Marriage be Saved?

On Friday my husband and I cooked wild caught salmon over a wood fire. We enjoyed it with garden vegetables and maybe a little too much wine. When the subject of genetically modified salmon came up, I was surprised to find that we disagreed—vehemently on my part.


The Food and Drug Administration is currently holding meetings (for only two days!?) on whether or not to approve marketing of a species of salmon genetically modified  to produce growth hormones all year long instead of seasonally. Proponents argue that this fast-growing salmon would be a significant new food source whose consumption would also spare wild salmon populations. Critics are concerned about allergens in this untested food and also about what could happen if genetically modified salmon were to escape. Would their rapid growth mean that they would consume more food to the detriment of existing wild species?

My husband argued that genetic modification is nothing new. In essence that’s what agriculture and animal husbandry are—plants and animals that were modified through selective breeding by humans who wanted to have more control over their food sources. Corn and cows, as we know them, do not exist in the wild and could not survive there. Fish are already being farmed; genetic modification is just one more step. And, as my husband pointed out, we have a huge and growing population to feed. And if I don’t like the corporate model of food production, what do I propose as an alternative? Relying on the regional, organic food model alone could mean the return of famines that have only been eradicated in the last century by mass food production.

That is where I got stuck. I could only say: I don’t know. I just know that the corporate model has had a questionable effect not only on food production but also on health care, publishing, and just about any other area of human enterprise we can name. (Then we began to argue about the profit motive; I won’t go into that here.) Since that evening, I have been reflecting on what troubles me about genetic modification, in addition to questions of safety.

It troubles me that no one is considering the spirit of the salmon, a fish revered by Celts and by many Native American peoples, especially in the Northwest. The legendary Irish hero Finn Macumhail burned his finger when cooking the Salmon of Wisdom for his teacher. When he put his finger in his mouth, the salmon’s wisdom became his. The Haida people tell a story of a boy who lacked respect for the salmon and was swept away by the river. The Salmon People rescue him, teach him the error of his ways and return him to his people as a healer and a shaman.

I do not want to see anyone starve, and surely the peoples of the Northwest have long revered the salmon as a source of food. I know that with our population a return to hunting and gathering is impossible, though I am more hopeful than my husband about bio-regional food production. Urban farming is a particularly exciting movement.

What troubles me about genetic engineering is that we are considering only our own short term interests. I would like to see FDA and other authorities routinely consult shamans as well as scientists. We need to consider what the Salmon People want, what life itself wants, what the seventh generation of all species wants.

My husband and I continue to debate. I close with this email just in from him: “It does seem like the FDA isn't looking very hard. I'm still not against the idea of GE in principle, but I do think we have to be extremely careful, and our regulators appear to be bought by the industry.”

Looks like the marriage will survive. I hope the wild salmon will, too.

On Paul of Tarsus and Terry Jones

Everyone from President Obama to Angela Jolie has made a pronouncement on Pastor Terry Jones’  proposed September 11th Quran burning—publicity Paul of Tarsus , a man who knew how to stage an event, might well have envied. Paul presided over the first public burning of books by Christians. In Ephesus, recent converts burned their scrolls on magic (presumably voluntarily) as a symbolic act of penitence as well as a literal act of destruction. Knowledge was more vulnerable in those days of hand-copied scrolls. Though the content of the Quran cannot be destroyed in this proposed fire, burning the Quran is a literal as well as symbolic assault on the Islamic faithful. In both cases, the book burnings are an aggressive assertion of the absolute supremacy of one religion through the demonizing of another.


Below is a fictional rendition (edited for brevity) of the book burning at Ephesus from my novel Bright Dark Madonna (Monkfish, 2009 used by permission). The narrative point of view belongs to Maeve, the feisty Celtic Mary Magdalen who is nobody’s disciple:

Intent on my own thoughts, I did not at first notice a larger than usual crowd gathering in the center of the square, until a hush fell, and a voice I could never forget rang out.

“Brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus, whether Jews or Gentiles, you are now one in the baptism of the Holy Spirit and heirs through Christ to eternal life. I, Paul, called from the womb to be apostle to Christ Jesus, adjure you to come forward with the emblems of your old reliance on sorcery and magic, from the time before you knew Christ Jesus, when you relied on charms and potions to work your own sinful will and satisfy your selfish desires.”

No one could ignore the strident, commanding voice of Paul of Tarsus. I was curious. Wrapping my widow’s shawl around me as a cloak of invisibility, I discovered that I still had my youthful talent for weaving my way through a crowd. No one paid much attention to me. They were all too intent on the public spectacle Paul was creating. And a spectacle it was. There, in front of Paul was a growing pile of scrolls, what were then called books, of all sizes and quality but every one of them costly in days when all writing was by hand. The equivalent of fifty thousand silver pieces was piled up in the square.

“Come forward and confess to your brothers and sisters in the Lord how you have used spells and practiced magic and how you now renounce all such foolishness and wickedness, having been redeemed by Christ Jesus through the baptism of the Holy Spirit.”

With their basic script provided for them, the new believers began to step forward and give details, sometimes lurid but mostly mundane, of their dabbling in magic and sorcery—to conceive children (or abort them as one brave woman admitted, before her husband yanked her off stage) to divine the future, to heal from sickness, to clinch business deals, to triumph over enemies, or get revenge. All the things people have always tried to control, whether through spells or appeals to gods and, yes, saints. Some people were enjoying their moment center stage while others looked bullied and shamed. Either way, there was something about the whole display that was getting on my nerves.

“What has any of this got to do with the teachings of Jesus?” A woman’s voice suddenly rang out over the din. “What does renouncing magic have to do with loving your neighbor as yourself—loving your enemy?”

To my astonishment the voice was mine and, moreover, I had stepped forward, my shawl falling away. Paul paled as he recognized me and looked for a moment as though he was going to be sick. Then he recovered and glared at me.

“Who is this woman, Apostle?” asked a man. “I do not recognize her. Is she a believer? Has she been baptized by the Holy Spirit?”

Paul was in a pickle, since he had baptized me himself, albeit against my will.

“Who has given this woman authority to speak?” people shouted. “Who has authority over her?”

“No one has authority over me!” I laughed. “I am a widow, as you see. As for who my husband was, I will tell you—”

“Aquila! Quick, a torch!” shouted Paul. “We will make a bonfire for Christ Jesus, a bonfire of our vanities, a bonfire of our unbelief. Christ Jesus is Lord. He is our head. Only he has authority. Only he can save us from death and sin.”

As he spoke, Aquila lit the pile of scrolls on fire, the flames caught and spread rapidly, the scrolls crackling impressively, and the first recorded book burning by Christians was underway. The crowd quickly lost interest in me. An outspoken, possibly crazy, widow was no competition for a holy blaze consuming costly wicked books.