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Extract from the Diary's Introductory Essay
Treasured trees
by Chris Maser, author, lecturer and consultant on forest ecology
I spent part of October 1992 in Japan, where the Shinto priests invited me to visit the Grand Shrine of Ise City. Shinto, in its broadest sense, refers to indigenous Japanese spiritual culture. When used in the narrow sense, it refers to the rites offered to deities or 'kami', primarily those of Heaven and Earth listed in classical Japanese works of the ancient period. The facility used for the performance of this worship is called a 'jinju' or shrine.
That Nature and natural phenomena are respected as deities is a result of the Japanese view of Nature as a kind of parent, which nurtures life and provides limitless blessings. In keeping with this view, Shinto shrines all over Japan are surrounded by luxuriant groves of trees. Backed by the Shinto view of untouched, natural scenery as sacred in itself, the forests are an important element of each shrine. In addition, the priests of olden times planted Cryptomeria trees within the Grand Shrine. Today, these trees are more than 500 years old, and each has its own recorded history, beginning the day it was planted.
I tell you about the Cryptomeria trees because they are revered for their written history as much as for themselves as living beings, and for the memories they are thought to pass from one generation to another through the corridors of time. In fact, the Cryptomeria trees are so loved by the people that they picked pieces of bark off them as a remembrance, much as a mother clips and saves a lock of her baby's hair. Over time, the people took so much bark the priests had to place protective, wooden 'girdles' around the trunk of each lest the people pick it bare.
In many cultures, trees without pedigrees are, nevertheless, a valued part of life. One example is the ancient pi-on pine forest in the vicinity of Taos, New Mexico, in the southwestern United States, which the indigenous Pueblo Indians had long used for both food (its seeds, called pi-on nuts) and firewood. In this case, the people of old, who collected pi-on nuts from certain trees throughout most of their lives, became acquainted with them as personalities, much as the Japanese have with their honored Cryptomeria trees. Yet, these pines, unlike the Cryptomerias, have no written history, only memories of an earlier culture held in the minds and hearts of a few Pueblo elders.
Scattered throughout various parts of the world, there still exists a 'communal tree' in the middle of the square around which village life revolves. It's a quaint, historic meeting place, where neighbours form bonds with one another, children play games, women visit about the affairs of life, and men discuss work and politics. Here, old and young mingle in a way that bridges the generations in the natural flow and ebb of village life. Children are still able to experience an unstructured and noncompetitive setting with their watchful parents close by.
Even in the vast deserts of North Africa, a communal tree gives a human scale to the nomadic Bedouin's meeting places. In the desert of Sinai, for example, a makhad ('the meeting place around the acacia tree') is the traditional Bedouin setting, where, according to their customs of friendship and hospitality, all who pass through the desert are welcomed. In fact, there is a particular acacia tree in the Sinai desert at the oasis garden of Ein-Khudra (an oasis mentioned in the Bible) that has been cultivated continuously by the same Bedouin family for over a thousand years.
These remarkably fertile 'oasis gardens' are filled with abundance, which reflects the Bedouin's love of and respect for their desert home. Makhads are a socially recognised commons that help to sustain the nomadic lifestyleacting as a fixed point around which the nomadic journey revolves.
When Christopher Columbus landed on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe on November 4, 1493, thousands of miles from the deserts of North Africa, the indigenous Carib or Kalinago people living there called their home Karukéra, 'Island of Beautiful Waters.'. But their loved island, as the name evoked, was to be despoiled more than a century later, as untold thousands of West African slaves poured through the West Indies in the 17th through the 19th centuries, bringing with them baobab trees, as well as their own spiritual beliefs in tree spirits and the magical powers of trees. Today, two of these trees growing on the island of Barbados are over 250 years in age and have trunks that measure 55 feet in circumference, which means it takes fifteen adults holding hands to encircle one of them. There is a perilous consequence for anyone who cuts down a baobab in the Caribbean Islands because that person will be haunted by the spirits living in its branches
Chris Maser
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