PLANTING TREES

Honoring Our Namesake

We want to honor our namesake and the ways we have experienced and continue to experience Divine Wisdom through trees. These include: 

• Childhood memories of climbing trees, sitting in them for hours listening to the breeze rustle through the leaves and becoming aware of the Sacred Mystery for the first time.    
• After a difficult loss while working at Cancer Care Clinics, letting go and receiving healing through a prayerful ritual of "giving the pain to the trees" with hands placed on a tree's trunk.
• Stunned by the awareness that what we breathe in, the trees breathe out, and what we breathe out, the trees breathe in...we are deeply interconnected...our very lives are bound up with trees.
• Watching the tops of trees when anxious and finding solace in the movement or shapes then teaching one's children to lift their eyes to the treetops and do the same.
• Lying on a park bench or blanket under a tree and looking up into the branches waiting to receive inspiration for a sermon or teaching.
• Walking through the forest when needing to feel grounded, renewed, and reconnected to God and Nature.
• Discovering a deep truth in 5th grade about beauty in dying, grief, and loss, by observing deciduous trees.
• Finding trees to be present in guided prayers-- places to rest and meet with God--as well as significant in much of the world's religions and relating to the Divine.  

What are ways trees have been (or are) a gift to you?