The Grassi Lakes stand about 5,000 feet above the town of Canmore in the Canadian Rockies. Though the region is a popular recreation area for tourists from all over the world, indigenous peoples have lived there for centuries.
Heather Black, a local indigenous activist who is a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy, owns and operates Buffalo Stone Woman. Her guided hiking tour company focuses on the history, culture, wisdom and present-day political and economic struggles of indigenous people in Canada. On a tour of Grassi Lakes I took with Heather this past July, she introduced me to Ruby, a pipe smoking elder and medicine woman of the Blackfoot. Pipe smokers hold an elevated spiritual status. They conduct sacred ceremonies, guide their fellow members with religious and moral wisdom and are believed to convey messages between our world and the world of spirits. The morning that we met, Ruby sat quietly in a circle with a group of us hikers, smoking her pipe and talking about indigenous medicinal knowledge. Since I’m fascinated by trees, I barely heard her speaking as I wandered off toward the lakes to take videos of a young aspen growing by the water, its leaves fluttering in the light wind.
Would that I’d spent less time capturing the aspen’s gossamer prattle on video and more time listening to it speak, as it were. I returned to the circle just in time to hear Ruby tell a story about her childhood, when her elders taught her to go down to the lake and listen with quiet care. I should have paid silent attention to her account about learning to listen; but my need to understand things and place them into neat informational boxes overcame me.
“Ruby,” I asked, “How are your people connected to trees?”
She took a slow, gentle drag on her pipe and told me another story.
“When I was younger, my elders would tell me to go down to the river and sit between the trees. ‘Listen to them,’ they would say, ‘they are speaking to each other and telling stories.’”
That was it? I anticipated a theological discourse about spirits residing in trees, taking the shapes of animals and humans, and providing guidance to people on their personal quests. I expected to hear something about animistic beliefs that might liberate my rigidly Western, monotheistic soul and provide it with a transgressive thrill. Ruby wasn’t about to accommodate my exoticizing fantasies, as if she were some magical Blackfoot woman. What I got was a simple reminder that we should trade places with the trees at times and listen humbly as they converse on the center stage of nature.
Her story reminded me of an ancient Jewish tradition about trees that speak. Two thousand years ago, the Roman empire ransacked and destroyed the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, brutally decimating the indigenous Jewish community living there. The great Jewish sage, Rabbi Yochanan, narrowly escaped death at the Romans’ hands and successfully revived Judaism after this trauma. The rabbi was known not only as a brilliant leader but as a mystic who would listen in on the conversations between trees. Once, when he was traveling on the road with a student, they stopped and sat under an olive tree where they proceeded to meditate on the secrets of the universe. Suddenly, fire came down from heaven and encircled all the nearby trees. The two sages listened as the trees sang a verse from the Book of Psalms, “Praise the Lord from the earth…fruit trees and all the cedars.”
From Rabbi Yochanan to Ruby the Elder, our diverse religious traditions are so different, yet they contain similar spiritual treasures that transcend those differences. Contemporary science demonstrates that trees do communicate danger and share resources, though certainly not with voices and nervous systems. Trees don’t literally speak, sing or converse. Yet this in no way diminishes the mythic power of these teachings. The Jewish rabbi and the Blackfoot elder are inviting us to turn our attention away from self-absorbed human conversations and, as it were, toward the conversations of trees: the sounds and sensations of life pulsing through the community of nature that we often ignore. By redirecting our attention in this way, we’re challenged to cultivate deepened humility; can we imagine ourselves not at the center of existence, but on its sidelines, as it were, listening imaginatively to the world of the more-than-human beings with whom we share the planet? Touched by the magnificence of trees’ and other species’ lives, can we perhaps develop a richer relationship with them that helps us to better preserve them and all of nature?
With winter’s approach, the trees are bereft of leaves, their myriad mouths that give them their voices. Yet their branches will speak and sing as they sway and bend in winter’s wind. From time to time, I’ll walk among them to listen. What stories will they have to tell me?
Dan Ornstein is the rabbi of Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY. Check out his writings at danornstein.com
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