Bringing It Down Carefully

It's been a pleasant week up at my father-in-law's house in Western Maryland, one filled with reading and hikes and puttering about on the lake.  The weather has been hot by Western Maryland standards, enough that the minisplit AC that had to be put in a few years back was working overtime, with fans set up to distribute that one unit's cool air through the rest of the upstairs.

That heat has meant that I've been using the mornings to get things done outside, focused on whittling away at one task in particular.

About twenty yards up the heavily wooded rise behind the house, I'd been long eyeing a deceased hardwood tree.  It died perhaps five or six years ago, and stood about seventy feet in height.  It weren't jus' dead.  It was really and sincerely dead.  The wood around the base and most of the way up the tree was unrotted, hard, and had "cured on the vine," and for the last few years I've figured it would offer up about a weeks' worth of evening fires in the hearth.

My goal, for this trip: finally bring it down, buck it into rounds, and schlep those rounds down the hill to dry and cure.  I've done that with two other deceased trees on the property, and at that height, it's just about at the top end of what my modest 18" homeowner-grade electric chainsaw can manage.

After taking a few minutes to sharpen, oil, and adjust the chain, up the hill I went with axe and wedge and chainsaw.  Within five minutes I'd hewed out the directional undercut, and begun the back cut to bring it down.  Being a suburbanite, I don't get to do this often, so it's always done 1) in the most straightforward and traditional way and 2) with as much care as my scatterbrain allows.  I know my limitations, and my propensity to forget things, like fully securing the chain-oil plug so's it doesn't goop oil down my pants.  Not that I've ever done that.  Ahem.

Bringing down a tree requires one's full attention.

Vibecoding might be a thing these days, as we offload our cognitive tasks to AI.  But Vibefelling a tree?  That too easily turns into an existential error, the sort of mistake that costs you property damage, a limb, or a life.  

So I consider and then create the undercut mindfully.  Where's this going to go, exactly?  I want to set it down not just as far away from the house and parked cars as possible, but also where it'll do the least harm to the healthy trees around it.  It's worth careful consideration and reconsideration.

As I'm putting in the back cut, I slow down right at the end.  Were I an experienced arborist working with excellent equipment, this would be less necessary.  But when you're engaged in an unfamiliar, infrequent, and risky task, take your sweet time about it.  I've felled fewer than a half-dozen trees in my fifty seven years of life, so I watched the cut like a hawk.  Has it begun to fractionally expand, the barely noticeable beginning of that long final fall?  I want to be a few strides away as soon as that movement begins, in the event I've misjudged something and the trunk steps out, heading in an unplanned direction.

I cut and checked, cut and checked.  Finally, that movement began, the clean line of the backcut expanding at a barely discernible rate.  I pulled the chainsaw blade, and stepped back as the expansion increased.

It all went as planned, and down it came precisely where I'd intended, with a satisfying crackling followed by a deep ground-shaking whump.  The tree, life long gone from it, was now ready to be sectioned out, bucked into rounds and split for the fire in winter.

When we realize a thing needs to be brought down, it's best to do so with care.  If you rush in, full of blind confidence and bravado, you're likely to do more harm than good.

The Wrong Tree

Having watched and listened to the dear departed Carl Sagan talking about our tiny, fragile world recently, I found myself watching the next video that spooled up on that particular YouTube playlist.  I love listening to Carl, who in his gentle warmth and wonder is...to my soul, at least...so much more inviting than Mr. Degrasse-Tyson, the celebrity scientist du jour.  Or maybe I'm just cheesed at Degrasse-Tyson for his one great scientific achievement, which was leading the charge for the demoting of Pluto from its status as a planet.  Grrr.

The second video I watched from Sagan was a critique of the human tendency to self-absorption, and specifically, some gently spoken but pointed debunking of what the good Mr. Sagan considered the deepest tensions between the Judeo-Christian tradition and science.

Sagan was not a theist, not at all.  A "strong agnostic," perhaps, with the weight heavily on the doubt. Most specifically, he had beef with two things:  

First, that human beings should have the arrogance to imagine that God--should such a being exist--is like us.  For that, he relies on that passage of Genesis where the Creator of the Universe makes us "in his image."

God, a bipedal hominid?  How preposterous!  Against this idea, he recounted the writings of the ancient philosopher Xenophanes, who mocked the human propensity to create deities that resembled themselves.  If cows made gods, they'd look like cows.  When cultures make gods, they look like themselves.  How silly!  How arrogant.

Which would be fine, if that had been meant as a critique of theism itself.  Given that Xenophanes was one of the first Greek monotheists?   It's not.  

The core of Xenophanes' argument was not a critique of the idea of God, but of the absurdity of anthropomorphizing such a being.    It's the difference between Zeus and the I AM THAT I AM, between Storm from the X-Men and the One who Speaks from the Whirlwind.

So, sure, yeah, God's ways are not our ways.  We do get that, my friend.  Point taken. 

Second?  The second and more substantial thing that struck me was Carl Sagan's recounting of the story of the garden in Genesis.  In Sagan's telling, what happens in Eden is simple.  We are forbidden to eat of the Tree of Knowledge.  We are kept from truth, kept from exploration, kept from the joys of discovery.  Humankind in Eden exists in ignorance, willfully suppressed by an oppressive, controlling Deity.

In this line of thinking, the Eden of Torah may be perfect, but it is a dark perfection, in which we are denied the right to know and wonder and explore, trapped forever in a stunted, childish state.  This is recounted as an indictment against all of the faith traditions that arise from that story.  Even in our most primal story, we are oppressive, and the enemy of science. 

It's a familiar spin, casting out the second of the two Genesis stories as a functional variant of the Prometheus myth, with the serpent in the role of Prometheus, the giver of fire and knowledge.  In that telling, God is the dark demiurge, the one who would keep humanity eternally subjugated.  That's the take of the ancient Gnostics, who saw only malignance and oppression in the story of the Garden, and for whom the serpent is Christ.  Interesting folks, the Gnostics.

It'd be a fair critique, if the Tree that shows up in that story from Torah was the Tree of Knowledge.

But it isn't.   

In that story, the tree is מֵעֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָ.  
  

It is me-esh haddat towb warah, the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil."  

What the adam, which means "creature of dirt" is warned against is not knowledge itself.  Everything already exists in the garden, in a state of primal, archetypal goodness.  All that--every creature, every plant, everything--can be known, explored, named, and wondered at.  That is, in fact, stated as humanity's purpose.  It is a place of learning and delight, in which every choice is good.

The warning is against being able to know and choose evil. God knows what is evil, what is broken, what will bring woe and hatred and oppression, and chose not to place it in the garden.

Which is why the story of Eden does not involve God being really cheesed off at the ish and the isshah for drawing up the specs for an unauthorized large Hadron Collider.  

The knowledge they get from that tree is social shame.  What they have learned is not the capacity to help and support one another--their created purpose--but the ability to pass blame and recrimination.

And there, from context and purpose, I must demur from the gnostic/atheist spin on that story.   It's just not what it says, or the reason for its telling.

Fruitless

I've always walked a fair amount.  It helps keep me centered and fit and helps me at least pass for sane.  So it was a source of some dismay this spring to discover that our new puppy didn't make the best hiking companion.  Long leisurely meditative walks are hard when one arm is attached to a creature that seems intent on heading in any direction but the one you're heading in, and the other arm is attached to a bag of poo.

Now that my dog is reaching the point where she's got a tiny bit more focus, and will walk with me rather than roaring off like a squirrel-seeking missile every 15 seconds, I'm finding my Monday morning rambles through neighborhoods and nearby woods have returned.

This morning as I wandered through the bright briskness of a Virginia October, I found myself noting the absence of something.  Back when I was a kid, my parents had an apple tree in their front yard, right outside of my window.  It was quite productive, and one of the primary yard tasks I had as a teen was to collect the best of the tart green apples for the occasional pie, and to rake up the rest for composting.   It was also an amazingly friendly climbing tree, one you could scamper up easily.  In the summer of 1989, a big storm took it down.  It felt like a loss.

I make a point of mixing up my walk routes, wandering through neighborhoods in such a way that I'm always exploring somewhere new.  But though I've hit most of the nearby neighborhoods, I see pretty much no fruit-bearing trees.  There aren't apples.  There aren't pears.  There aren't cherry trees.   I don't see blackberry vines, or raspberry vines.  Virginia soil is perfect for these fruit, and yet my neighborhood seems devoid of it.

I suppose it's a bother having to clean up, or feeling obligated to make preserves and pies.  We're just too busy.  We're willing to spend endless hours mowing and trimming, or perhaps growing tomatoes or zucchini.  But fruit?  Apparently, at least in my neck of what used to be the woods, we don't have time for it.  It's just not part of our suburban desert.

So we get our apples under bright florescent light, wrapped in plastic, sprayed with pesticide, trucked in in bulk.

For some reason, the fence in my back yard suddenly looks like it might just be the ideal place for a blackberry planting or three come spring.

Seeking and Finding

As my little congregation continues to wrestle with some pretty deep organizational and spiritual challenges, I find myself struggling with where my own prayer and meditation fits into the whole paid staffer thing.

On the one hand, it's easy to get sucked into the organizational dynamics of the church. It's the prepping of budgets and crafting of strategic planning memos, having Serious Discussions About Our Future, then more meetings, planning retreats, and then having still more meetings. It's the Presbyterian way, and it's work, in the same way that secular work is work. You are earning your keep. You are making sure you add value to the organization. You're an employee.

But there are days when what the Spirit wants me to do is anything but sit in my office dithering over the details of this Sunday's liturgy, or using mindmapping software to conceptualize possible futures for the ministry, or scurrying to another meeting. I feel the need to go deep and be centered, to go focus, to leave the office and the demands of the church as an organization. Though church is typically the center of my faith life, I do find myself with the deep Jesus urge to get the heck out of Dodge now and again. The conflicts and struggles that have recently riven my little community color the spirit of the sanctuary, particularly when I'm seeking calm. And as I feel the stresses and uncertainties of my own life like shards of glass around my heart, I know I'm not providing the conduit to the Creator's presence that the church needs.

But...where to go?

I prefer walking meditation, and I do walk. But I also find need for stillness. Problem is...where to find it? Where to find a little sacred space, where I can be securely away from people and their scurrying and bustling? In seminary, that place was an old dusty storeroom above the chapel entrance. But I've been feeling that yearning for a new place lately.

On Sunday, I went looking for such a quiet place, walking mindfully through the woods that run alongside the banks of the Potomac. Perhaps a well placed log by the waterside? Or a little grotto speckled with flowers and leaf-scattered light?

As I searched by the riverside for a place that might serve for silent prayer, I came across a tree. It was a great immense thing, thickening out so much enough around the base that four grown men couldn't put their arms fully around it. It sat by the waterside, within both view and earshot of the soft nickering of the flood-browned river. Where living wood met earth, I found a natural opening, half my height and shaped like a door. Inside that door into the tree, there was a dirt floored room more than six feet in diameter, with a ceiling that rose up beyond my outstretched arm into dark moist stillness. It was, for all intents and purposes, a little prayer cell.

Seek, and ye shall find.