June 14, 2024
Many folks living around us are in a relationship with trees, or so say readers of the Seattle Times.[1] Maybe you’re one of them. It happened to me, too.
Back in Missouri, as Dee and I were hiking a trail near a YMCA camp, I was confronted by an unfamiliar tree. It seemed to lean into the trail, calling for my attention, which brought to mind philosopher Martin Buber’s description of possible relationships to a tree in I and Thou.[2] Unlike other trees we passed, this one wore strangely broken bark. I had to feel its rough sides and take its portrait. Later I learned it was a Shortleaf Pine (Pinus echinata), the only native pine in Missouri, and native throughout the Southeastern U.S. Its distinctive bark I admired so much is part of its unique identity.[3]
Maybe you’ve had a similar “I-Thou” experience with a tree. And you may have sensed human-like feelings emanating from it, too. We humans do have a habit of anthropomorphizing trees, our garden flowers, that humming bird, and certainly our pets, perhaps as a way to recognize that we are in relationship with those creatures around us.
In Monastic Ecological Wisdom, Samuel Torvend wrote that our terrain is, “neither a stranger ‘out there,’ nor a collection of inanimate objects; the earthy place of one’s existence becomes a prominent actor in one’s life.”[4] As we turn to relate to these others as a Thou, not a thing, they can be sacraments of God’s presence, care, and love.
I’m discovering it is good and healthy to relate to the living creatures of our “earthy place”—our Pierce County, our globe, and our gloriously expansive universe—as relations, some distant, but all made of the same “star stuff” and energized by the same creator.
~King Schoenfeld
[1] Opinion, Seattle Times 24 May 2024.
[2] Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Scribner’s, 1958): 7, 2nd ed. In English Translation. Orig. Ich und Du, 1923.
[3] But as the Forest Stewards Guild reports, shortleaf pine habitat has diminished by more than 50% in the last 30 years.
[4] Samuel Torvend, Monastic Ecological Wisdom: A Living Tradition (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2023), 126.
