(Originally published at "A Year of Service" 6/26/16)
I was asked by a coworker to write an essay about my connection to nature for our workplace newsletter. The essay is next month's contribution to an ongoing series called The Green Corner. I started doing just that -- writing about how I had developed a connection with nature -- but it became something else entirely. It morphed into a statement about service to nature and to people and where I see myself located between those two things. I'm thankful for the opportunity to work that out on paper because it helped me formulate some new thoughts on my work. The ecology projects I'm carrying out are acts of creative love. Here is my essay:
Why do snakes look so weird? Why did birds evolve to fly above the ground? Why are they both so different from us? I don’t know those answers but the more we look at nature the more variation we see. It’s almost as if difference is valued by the creator, or natural selection, or both.
One of my favorite trees is called devil’s walking stick and I will never forget the day we met. As a child, I spent a lot of time in the woods and thought I knew all the trees and shrubs and forest flowers around me. One fateful day I ventured off my usual rambling trail and lost my footing in a pile of dry leaves at the top of a steep slope. As I slid down I reached out for a nearby trunk to slow my descent. The thorns greeted me first so I let go! When I eventually stopped sliding downhill I faced the stinging pain and wondered what on earth I had just encountered. What was that thing with those ridiculous thorns? Could trees even have thorns like that?On my next trip to the library I found the tree in a field guide. It is a small tree, no more than 10 feet tall, and its leaves are lush and tropical. In spring the tree is topped with foamy clouds of white blossoms. I learned that the spines covering its trunk protect it from deer that would otherwise eat it to the ground and from smaller mammals that would climb the tree and devour its fruits. I learned that mammoths and mastodons may have been warded off by those spines in the distant past. The spines help the tree reserve its fruits for songbirds and, in return, they scatter the seeds far and wide.
This information transformed my dismay to respect. When I next visited the tree and reflected on its story, its script on the stage of life, my respect became admiration. Devil’s walking stick is uncommon and few people know that it exists. As we continue to replace woods and fields with roads and shopping malls it will become even more uncommon. I wonder how many other wonderful things have already vanished along with their stories, unknown and unloved, victims of our carelessness.
One day shortly after these events I came home from school to the sound of heavy machinery and chainsaws. The 100-acre woods I had known as my own Eden was being cut down. The landowner made a few thousand dollars from the timber and put that money into an investment account. By the next spring, the creek had filled with silt. The leaves and flowers carpeting the ground had washed into the creek or died. Large erosion gullies appeared everywhere. The birds, the crayfish, the garter snakes, the butterflies, the devil’s walking stick, the 200-year-old beech tree with exposed roots forming a big chair high over the creek – all my friends – had disappeared.It’s difficult to explain the sadness I felt but the loss of that place was very real to me. While a part of my sadness was selfish, a longing for the woods I loved so much, there was also grieving for the rich web of life that was extinguished there. Even as a child, I knew that the birds could fly away but the crayfish and the shiners in the creek pools could not. They died with the trees. I didn’t have the words for it at the time but now I can say the place was sacred. The animals were sacred, the trees were sacred. The wood was a temple where I went when I needed to pray. I always found quiet and I always encountered god there. I was a part of that place and the whole thing was sacred.
I can’t get that wood back but I still have a deep connection with nature. It is like a language learned through experience and reflection. It’s not a commonly spoken language but anyone can pick it up. I spend my evenings and weekends giving lessons by engaging my neighbors in habitat projects.
A year ago I was invited to design the country’s first Transgender Memorial Garden, a garden dedicated to the memory of transgender people who have been lost through acts of violence. I admit for about five minutes I wavered, wondering what people would say if they knew I had affiliated myself with the transgender community. But I was not put here to separate myself from others or from nature. The natural sacredness in the world includes us in all our variations. So I accepted and I designed with trees and flowers of eastern Missouri. I talked with the community about the native beauty that still exists, hidden and overlooked, in our alleys and waste places and how we can bring that back to life in the garden. I brought along my old friend, devil’s walking stick. The symbolism is not lost on the community: unknown and disregarded by many; with a name and thorns that present a façade of danger; yet beneath it all the complexity and intense beauty that can come with a struggle for survival.
I can’t speak for this community but I heard their stories of loss. They too have been cast out of Eden, out of their families, out of their churches, and all too often out of life itself. They have been told they are not sacred. I don’t know why people who are different trouble us so much. We are all part of the same family of life, infinitely varied.
In response, I drew a sacred landscape and filled it with native trees that are strange, formidable, unapologetic and almost entirely unheard of. The garden has rapidly become a haven, a pilgrimage site where people flock together to meet, grieve and share life. As knowledge of the garden spreads the trees are becoming a small part of the story of the transgender community in St. Louis. Often I sit apart and observe how the trees are anchors, even in their youth, connecting the community to this soil. They form a sacred structure - real, true, beautiful, millions of years old - while around them the people transform their lives and bodies. The garden is sacred. The people are sacred. The whole thing is sacred.
I was asked to write an essay about my relationship to nature but I can’t separate the trees from the people. The only way I can go back to my sacred wood is by taking people with me. When I see beauty in nature and beauty in people I am there in spirit. The world is an amazing place full of variety we’ve not yet appreciated and stories we haven’t yet heard. I look for it and look at it in order to honor it. I’m going to keep looking and talking and holding because I don’t want any more of it to slip away.
