Friday the 13th, Part 2

Today is Freya's day again. She came to me this morning, eyes full of leaves and sunlight, and asked me to tell you this tale.

When we lived in Lander, Wyoming, we had three huge blue spruce in our front yard. They towered over the lawn, keeping the grass green in the heat of summer, offering us shade and the fresh smell of sap beneath their prickly branches. One day a huge wind blew two of these leviathans over. They fell gently, side by side, together in their demise as they had been in life, missing by inches the neighbor's roof and leaving giant craters in our front lawn where once their roots had held fast to earth.

The next day, walking about among the suddenly vertical branches, most taller than our heads, we were heartbroken. These two great giants had been such good friends to us. We stood next to them, hands on their thick trunks, where the sap would no longer flow, and we grieved. The last moisture their spiky little needles knew was our tears.

Later our friend and priest, Ann, came over with her prayer book and her stole. Perceptive pastor, she had put together a liturgy for us and the trees. Rosean's daughter Al and a friend, visiting from Fort Collins, joined us in our ritual. There was a place for a eulogy in our ceremony, and we cried. We said our goodbyes and wished the tree spirits well in their return to union with their creator, and we cried some more.

Al's friend was quite mystified by this display. You could read it on her face. "These older women," said her eyebrows. "Wacky," agreed the tension of small muscles in her expressive lips. We didn't care; her presence was welcome anyway. Somewhere deep inside her, we were sure, in the place of Soul, her own roots were being watered.

In the place of Soul we greet our special trees by name. We climb up in them as soon as our small arms and legs are able, and they embrace us in a secret world of swaying limbs and sweeping vistas. We lean against their trunks in the shade to read. We bring our sweethearts to them, and later our children. We place our houses and our gardens under their spreading arms.

Whole ecosystems are born and die in the shelter of one single tree.

Freya tells me it is important that we all remember this. It is important that we give our hearts to our trees.

She knows it is a complicated issue. She realizes everyone must make their own personal ethical decisions based on the information they have been given. She would simply also like to point out -- well, dust bowls, for instance -- and maybe our problems with the ozone layer -- oh, and perhaps crippling drought -- those sorts of things, which in her view come about as the result of being out of communication with trees.

More importantly even than this, though, she would like to say: it makes us less than human when we do not love our trees.