Illegally Hospicing Old Oak Trees

We sat around in circle the other afternoon, a group of magical women we have convened here in Alabama. My dear, wise elder friend Lee shared, tearfully, that she had seen the massive Oak trees in our neighborhood being unceremoniously cut down that day. She wept.

I felt a familiar fire in my belly - the Dragon Mother’s rage of sacred protection. As the tears rolled down her face, I burned alive, searing with rage.

I knew which trees she was talking about. At the end of our road, a large piece of land — 5-6 acres, where an old church has stood, right in town— had been for sale for years. At first, developers tried to turn it into a massive apartment complex. The community fought it. But recently, a new church get permits, a construction company placed privacy fences along the road, and began and massive mowdown.

My neighborhood is one of the last old-school neighborhoods in Birmingham. Built in the 1940’s, the the houses are old, and small, and the trees are big. Water Oaks, Hickories, huge Pines, and Magnolias, mixed in between the landscaping— azaleas, roses, boxwoods and hydrangeas. These trees are 100-200 years old— many of them more— rooted into the Earth here long before these post-war starter homes were built.

Where I live, people care for things, and care for the Earth-ish. Mostly as long as it looks good. But though it looks good, there is poison in the soil, if you know what I mean.

A few months ago, I held rageful, hopeless witness as a house across the street was torn down completely, and five massive old oak trees were sawed to the ground. The lot was flattened. Not even ONE left for a child to build a swing, or an owl family to nest in, or the shade to offer its generous coolness to the home in the dead of August. Just razed. I felt the birds and squirrels frantically communicating to each other to get out now.

I spoke to the tree-workers, the neighbors. No one cared. Each one thinking about how trees fall on roofs, and how much square footage they can get from the new house on the lot, or the privacy fence the developer promised them. All I could do was cry, and teach Oran about the Oak in our front yard, and sigh. They do not know what they do, Father. Please forgive them.

We tried to go get the wood to make something of value,\, but a truck came, and took it to the dumpster. Not even to make mulch. Just to rot and rest its corpse next to milk cartons and plastic toys.

So when Lee began crying on Sunday, that rage returned with a vengence.

How could they not know?

How could they not see?

How can we be so invisible to the most sacred thing, right under our noses?

Why are we still paving paradise to put up parking lots?

As we witnessed her grief, Lee shared that she wanted to go see them and honor them. Without thinking, I said, “I’ll go with you. Let me get Oran to sleep, and I”ll walk down the road with you."

Our friend Jasper, who also knows and loves trees, began to share. a story about one of her beloved trees, and how it fell into the spring that was nourishing it, and how she wept and wept, and how she communed with the tree’s spirit, even though it was dead. And she shared wise words about how the big trees are part of the very small percentage of trees that are born that ever reach adulthood (something like less than 10%!). And so the ones that get big like that are giants, they are elders, and they have survived all odds. And we all sighed more.

And then she went on to share about how she held witness for her special tree’s death. And that of course, trees will be born and die. But how in our indigenous communities, we would have danced and sang and given thanks for that tree’s life and death. And that in that honoring, we might counteract the effects of a tragic and unnecessary death.

And so later that night, I got Oran to sleep, and tiptoed out of the house into the warm June night. As I walked, alone, down to the construction site, I wondered how I became a radicalized Earth lover and tender. I wondered how my life became this, and how I became to believe that rituals like hospicing old trees is so vital. Somewhere along the way, I became a Mother of Creation, and I will not look back.

As Lee and I crawled, illegally, under construction fences, I shared the sentiment with her, and she looked at me with a twinkle in her eye, and said, “Wait ‘til you become a Grandmother.”

And so, together, a Mother and a Grandmother of Creation, radicalized for the Earth, dusted dirt off their evening clothes, and walked somberly to the pile of tree bones. Senseless waste, wildly unethical — hundreds of massive tree branches, homes for squirrels and hawks and owls— leaves who have provided untold particles of oxygen— simply chainsawed down to the ground.

And we cried.

And we walked, mouths agape at just how wide the destruction was.

Slowly, we began to touch the trees, and talk to them, and tell them we were sorry. Sorry for how ignorant humans are. Slowly, we began to listen to them, and count their rings, and wonder at their ages. And I began to see what they saw in their lifetimes— the entire neighborhood being built from scratch, and the hundreds and thousands of babies born right near by, and I felt how many animals they housed.

And we poured upon their stumps water from Brigid’s wells, and medicine of Ohia Lehua from Hawaii, and Ayahuasca to let them know we are listening. And I smoked my pipe and we sang them songs, as we watched Jupiter and Venus rise in the night sky.

There was one tree left. A massive one— the male elder. I could feel the uncertainty in his being— uncertain whether he would live or die, having watched his entire faily killed in previous days. We took note that all of the heavy equipment was gone, and I said silent prayers that the men in power would have changes of heart, and feel how magical and sacred it would be to have a massive oak tree on the church property. And I prayed to Brigid, who birthed a church under a massive Oak, 1200 years ago in Ireland.

But yesterday, as Oran and I drove by the site, there were ropes tied around its old body, and wrapped through its branches, and trucks and cranes and saws, pulling it apart piece by piece. And I sighed.

And all I could do was be so grateful that its life was witnessed the night before. That someone saw, and someone knew, and it got to hear songs of the Earth before it was killed.

I pulled the car over and texted by circle of magical women. And I asked them to hold this tree in their hearts in this exact moment, as it was being killed, and honor its life.

And as Oran watched me cry, all I could say is, “Oran, that was a very special Oak tree. And the humans are killing it, and it makes Mama so, so sad. And one day, you’ll have to do your best to remember why they are so special, and figure out what to do here on Earth, to make sure people can see.”

Before Lee and crawled back out under the construction fences that night before, we gathered a few logs of pine for the next sweat lodge fire, and each got a small slice of the Oak tree. Somehow, in the process of cutting the trees down, two small, liftable pieces were created— ones that can sit on altars or be made into art or pipes, or something valuable so that the tree’s life lives on. Something lives on, saved from the landfill.

And that is all we can do.

All we can do is live in our lives in the way we know how, hospicing this sacred Earth as it is destroyed, singing songs and holding our hearts wide open to hold witness. All we can do is weave the threads of Love through the next generations, and initiate ourselves into Motherhood, and Elderhood, in ways that radicalize us to protect Life.

And pray that though the trees will fall, our witness of their Lives is somehow enough.

Before we left that night with our branches and logs, tree stumps soaked with Ayahuasca and rose petals and holy well water and tobacco, we laughed at what would happen in the morning, when the workers arrived to see rose petals on top of the stumps.

I like to imagine that moment.

Maybe it will be enough.

All my love,

Jane