This month is seeing me wrap up a year-long project, the idea for which was born back in December ‘22.  My husband had just started a CUUPS (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) group at our UU church and was looking for activities for us all to do.  He put out a call for suggestions, and I was inspired to create a series of New Moon rituals centered around the local Trees.  That idea was itself inspired by the Celtic Tree calendar, which has dubious historical validity, but still has spiritual validity in my opinion.

The United Kingdom has different Trees than we do here, enough so that the major representatives of the Pacific Northwest Forest were not represented by the Celtic Tree calendar.  As such, I had to make my own.  Perhaps not coincidentally, I had picked up a book about Trees and spirituality, Whispers From the Woods, that encouraged its readers to do exactly that.

And so the Western Oregon New Moon Tree Calendar was born.  I restricted myself to the geographic region I live in mostly because I wanted to familiarize myself with my new home.  I also wanted to keep the scope of the project manageable, as I knew there were dozens if not hundreds of species of Tree in the Pacific Northwest.  I did an internet search for “most common trees of western Oregon” and, not coincidentally again, came up with a list of 13 Trees to correlate with the year’s New Moons, of which there were 13 last year.

I then constructed a base ritual which could be customized for each month’s Tree, an act that itself achieved perfect flow.  I felt like I didn’t write the ritual so much as channel it from somewhere else.  Perhaps I was hearing the silent Voice of the Forest itself, which I can see from my house.  Whatever the case, the ritual I created is an homage to Trees and the Forest and their vital place in all of our lives, as seen in the Invocation of the Tree:

I invoke the Tree. In an interdependent universe, everything and everyone holds importance in the world, yet there are two things deserving of special reverence: the mighty Tree and the Forest it builds.  The three trillion trees of planet Earth are more numerous than the stars in the Milky Way.  These silent sentinels of life are responsible for the air we breathe. They hold the soil and whole mountainsides in place, enabling snowpacks to accumulate and waters to flow. They are home to millions of creatures great and small, all part of the great life web of sustenance that provides us with food. Trees have provided oxygen and shelter, fuel and tools for our entire existence on this planet. We owe them our lives from deep into the past to far into the future. We are no more separate from the Trees and the Forest than we are from our own skin.

Once I had that done, I had to decide what month to put each Tree in.  There were a roughly equal number of coniferous Trees and deciduous Trees, so I divided them between the colder, darker half of the year when the conifers were more dominant, and the lighter, warmer half when the deciduous Trees had leafed out or were changing.  I also generally tried to align each Tree with the zodiac sign of that month’s New Moon according to that Tree’s lore.   Which meant I had to engage in specific research into each individual Tree that was being honored on a monthly basis, at which point Wikipedia became my best friend.

I couldn’t solely rely upon Wikipedia, though.  I wasn’t just looking for factoids on the Trees, I wanted to know their cultural history, how people in the past had interacted with them and utilized them, not just here but everywhere.  For that information, I had to dig a little harder, typically making an internet search each month on “[Tree] lore”, often coming up with next to nothing.  I was saddened to discover that a great deal of the spiritual and cultural information that I knew had existed at one time had been lost to centuries of warfare and religious domination, or those who still retained that information were no longer sharing it.

Still, I was able to find a great deal of historical and cultural information about each Tree by digging on the internet and reading books.  While the lack of information paints an incomplete picture, the picture that can be seen is wondrous, illustrating a rich tapestry of respectful interaction between humans and the Trees in their environment in cultures all over the world.  If Trees grew somewhere, we have gathered around them and been grateful and respectful for what they could provide.  In the historical instances in which that respect has been lost and replaced with an attitude of dominance and exploitation, the consequences have been grave, literally (see the classic Mayan Civilization).

And so I have slowly progressed over the last year, learning about each month’s Tree, beginning with the biological ambassador of the Pacific Northwest ecozone, the Western Hemlock.  This tree can grow to nearly 300’ in height, yet grows from tiny 2mm seeds that come from cones less than 1” long.  The Sitka Spruce is also called ‘tonewood’ because it makes good musical instruments.  Ash wood is sacred to Poseidon and was carried by sailors on voyages for good luck.  Oaks and cedars are probably the world’s oldest sacred Trees, Oak in particular becoming associated with the Heavens for its proven propensity to be struck by lightning more often than other Trees and still survive.

I learned fascinating facts every month about each Tree’s biology, its historical uses, its cultural history, and any Indigenous lore associated with it, of which there was still much.  Before I undertook this project, the Forest I lived in was a mystery, full of nothing but chaotic green needles and leaves and brown trunks and branches, underlaid by a layer of mosses, ferns, and blackberry bushes.  A year later, it’s still mysterious, but there’s an order to the mystery.  I can tell a hemlock from a spruce from a pine from a cypress from a fir from a redwood now.  I know the Tree I see the most of is the Douglas-fir, the state Tree of Oregon.  I know that its Latin name Pseudotsuga means “false hemlock”, because apparently it’s not really a fir, and not really a hemlock, and is really closer to a spruce.  I now understand why so many people look at any conifer and say, “it’s a pine tree.”

Like any decent long-term project, now that I’m essentially finished with the foundational information, now comes the diligent work of filling in the gaps with the lessons I’ve learned along the way.  The Western Hemlock from the beginning of the cycle deserves the same treatment as the Coast Redwood from the end of the cycle.  I’m looking forward to watching this project evolve and flesh out into something that stands on its own.  Because I’m a helpful and curious person, I have visions of creating Tree Calendars for people in other parts of the Northwest: Eastern Oregon, Western & Eastern Washington, Northern California, Southeast Alaska, Idaho, and Eastern & Western British Columbia.  These are all regions within the greater Pacific Northwest, but they are highly individual, each having their own characteristic Trees. 

I have much more to learn about the Trees here.  Each ritual has a section that talks about that month’s Tree, and the earliest ones were very short: 300 words or less.  My most recent ritual honoring Sequoia sempervirens, the Coast Redwood, came to nearly 800 words.  I held back at first, wanting to keep the rituals short, knowing how short people’s attention spans can be.  But the response to the rituals was so positive that I began putting more effort into the monthly research and writeup.  People are perfectly happy to sit there for ten solid minutes while my husband reads them the treatise on that month’s Tree.

I have the right audience, though.  One of our attendees has the best license plate in the state of Oregon: “TREES”.  Having lived in the presence of these Trees for nearly two years now, I can completely understand how some people feel so driven to protect them that they’re willing to put their lives on the line, even climbing to the top of the Forest’s oldest residents and staying there so they won’t be cut down.  Logging trucks are a common sight where I live, and most of the time they’re filled with the narrow trunks of young, farmed Douglas-firs and other conifers.  Every now and then, though, I see one loaded with what is plainly an older-growth Tree, the bed occupied by only three or four massive chunks of a single trunk rather than 20-30 younger farmed Trees, and my heart breaks.  It looks like a corpse being driven down the road to me.  I do not understand the mindset of someone who looks at these Forests and sees only dollar signs.

However, while I am a staunch environmentalist, I am not an idiot.  I know that humans rely on wood for many things, most notably the houses we live in in the First World, and in some areas, it is still the primary source of heat and cooking fuel.  Still, I am a fierce advocate for balanced and responsible management of Forests and believe wholeheartedly that such a balance is easily achievable if everyone works together.  We can have Natural beauty that supports Life in all of its forms, ourselves and the Trees included.  This will require cultivating the Taoist mindset spoken of in my recent post about the book Wild Mind, Wild Earth.  Until we stop seeing ourselves as separate from the environment we live in, we will continue to exploit and dominate it, unaware we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction.

In the meantime, I’ll keep doing my part to bolster the energy of those who love and protect the Forest that we live in up here in the Northwest corner of the country, a throwback to the Forests of the Cretaceous Era.  Maybe that’s why it feels so primordial and alive here, where the biomass exceeds that of the tropical Forest by four times in places, there is so much organic matter and moisture.  I first learned of the temperate rainforest while looking in an atlas in my late teens.  Just reading its description, I thought to myself, “that sounds like a wonderful place, I’ll have to go there someday”.  Then I saw pictures and thought the same thing.  Then I finally visited over 20 years ago and thought, “I have to live here.”

Now I’m here, and it has been my pleasurable privilege to educate myself on the residents of the Forest, whom I consider to be my Neighbors.  Call me crazy, but sometimes I really can ‘hear’ the Voice of the Forest and of individual Trees.  The Forest’s Voice is naturally made up of many Voices, but they Speak as One.  And if you listen with the right ears, they have much to tell.  An undisturbed Tree allowed to live out its lifespan typically has a much longer perspective on the World than we do, depending on the Tree.  Some may only live to be 100, not much older than we are, but others can live to be well over 2000 years old: twenty or more of our lifetimes.  Imagine what the World, and we, must look like to ‘eyes’ like that.