11/4/10 tree-tending

The giant tree-like Ents are a weird people in the movie and the written trilogies of "Lord of the Rings." The Ents resemble trees themselves, and so totally blend in with a forest milieu. We marvel at them, but I think this fictional "invention" strikes a deep note, because it is part of our collective human experience to revere trees (oops, more than I intended to invoke--now I have to acknowledge the Druids. There.)

In her book, "Iroquoian Woman," Barbara Mann describes the physical and spiritual labor that went into maintaining the "pristine wilderness'" park-like quality that the European colonists encountered on their arrival in North America. In gender-role divisions, for the Iroquois anyway, the men would tend the forests, meadows, heaths, wild rivers and so on, by planting trees, shrubs, flowering and medicinal plants, by doing proscribed burns to control vegetation, and by befriending and taking care of the so-called wild animals.

Someone I met who had studied with the descendent of a different indigenous North American tradition told me once that the first peoples of this continent thinned the trees to no more than 40 mature trees per acre. Much less than the overgrown contemporary forests, that are stressed by insects, overuse by humans, crowding, etc.

In her book, "Behaving as if the God in All Life Mattered," Machelle Small Wright describes being in a deep meditation and actually seeing living trees on her property move without trauma, root trunk and crown, move tens of feet from a previous location.

My own story is not magic. A scrub elm in my yard, about 30 feet tall and very thin, part of a triplet trunk, started drooping in the spring. I had been communicating with the spirit of the tree for months, and finally, after this past weekend's windstorm, the trunk was doubled over so that its crown was nearly brushing the grass below. And there are small children living in another unit on the property, so it was not safe to continue to let the tree do its thing. And I only had my hand saw. So I had to choose the right place, right moment. I started sawing a few hours before dusk, but it was tiring and slow going. I asked the tree for help, then wandered into the house and spaced out. I went back, in my lazy, wise way, when it was much darker out, when the sap had stopped running, and then my saw cut through the tree easily. I'm sharing this advice: Do your tree-cutting as much toward dark as possible, and it will be easier on you(and probably easier on the tree as well)