The story of the tree altar
A tale of more-than-human magic and collaboration
Dear readers,
Last week I wrote about a story not being accepted for publication. Here it is! I am beyond thrilled to share this story with you, and for it to have a home here, with you.
Since it is a story, it is ideal for being read aloud, so I am including an audio version for you to listen to, if you want to be read to :)
I hope you enjoy it!
-Stephanie
This story is dedicated to my COS gals, my Mill Street neighborhood, and of course, to the tree altar and all its magic, now dispersed.
“Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.”
–Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Introduction
Interbeing is a word created by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh to reflect our beyond-interconnected relationship with each other and the Earth, that we are not just interconnected (which still implies some degree of separation) – we inter-are. When we realize the insight of interbeing - which he articulates as not a theory but a reality that we can directly experience at each moment - we understand that we are always acting with the world, rather than upon it (and as my teacher Bayo Akomolafe has said, even acting-upon is still acting-with). It is a call and response, a co-creating, a collaboration, a reciprocity. The Earth is an actor and activist, too. We are not acting alone, we are acting together, always.
This collaboration is counter to Western hyper-toxic-individualism, which says WE must act. I must act, from my ego, alone. Even with best intentions, this is problematic, and a lot of environmental activism that is grounded in dominant culture can forget or dismiss the fact that the earth is already acting, too. We are always collaborating. We are interbeings, and there is magic to be found in working with the unseen energies of life, with seasons and stars and spirit and dreams.
By way of example of this kind of collaboration, I would like to tell you the story of the tree altar. It is a story about a tree, about paying attention, and about the magic that can unfold when we do.
The Story of the Tree Altar
Once upon a time there was a tree, and this tree stood tall in the median of a main street, Cascade Avenue, in a city, Colorado Springs, where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains at the base of Tava (also known as Pike’s Peak), the majestic sacred mountain and its surroundings that are the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary homelands of the Niuchu (Ute) nation. This tree was very tall, maybe 30 feet in height, and had been in this place for a very long time.
One midwinter day, there were unusually strong winds, over one hundred miles per hour, a chaotic weather pattern characteristic of anthropogenic climate change. The wind tossed garbage cans across the city streets, branches flew, and people braced themselves.
A woman was looking out her window, watching all of this unfold. She was writing her dissertation, trying to figure out how to complete it. Conclusions are always so hard to write, especially when nothing feels conclusive, ever open, ever changing. Perplexed, she paused to stare out the window, looking at the street. At that very moment, she witnessed the fall of this great giant.
But it wasn’t a falling. It was a crumpling, a crushing. It didn't just get knocked over. It was more like it got crushed by an invisible fist and disintegrated to the ground. She was in shock. She couldn’t believe her eyes. It crumpled so easily in the fierce winds.
In her dissertation, she wrote:
As I sit here writing…I watched a tree crumple like papier-mâché. The violent, awe-inducing gusts of wind become a part of the writing…I ask myself again, What is the knowledge we need in this moment?
This is what is happening here, but some version of this is happening everywhere. This past summer, it was not being able to breathe well from the smoke from the wildfires. Now, the unprecedented winds and winter wildfires. Climate chaos is here. We are living in it.
We need a collective funeral for them, I text a friend. Let’s build altars around the stumps.
I go outside to visit with the stump. I notice the trees that remain and wonder how they are still standing. We need deep roots and strong trunks for what we are facing. Very, very deep roots. We need to be hydrated to be able to withstand these winds, or whatever else might be coming.
The next day some neighbors gathered to chop the trunk and move it out of the way of the street, which it was blocking. It was a collective effort. Eventually, some weeks later, the city came and took away the trunk and branches. The large stump was left, alone.
Not knowing what else to do, but feeling like she needed to do something, she made an altar of its stump. Her first offering was flowers from the bouquet she had bought for the first anniversary of her mother’s death. It was now January. She placed them around the tree to honor it, to acknowledge it. You were here, you were a neighbor, you were part of our community, and the winds took you. I am sorry.
She began adding more. Little stones, knickknacks, treasures. She did it with her 3-year old daughter who delighted in it. Her daughter would ask to go visit and make things for the altar, and so they did. They took more flowers, and more flowers, and more flowers.
Springtime came, and something surprising happened. A halo of green began to grow. Not just the grass around it - this was a perfect circle, as the flowers had been laid around. The dried flowers she had left from the bouquet for her mother had left seeds, and the seeds had begun to grow. The altar was now collaborating. It was a miracle.
The halo grew taller. When the city workers would come, she kept thinking they would mow it down, but they didn’t. It grew taller and taller, and each time she saw them come, she thought, this is the time they’ll cut it. But they didn’t. She realized the city workers were now a part of it too, this collaboration. They were a part of it by leaving it, by not intervening. Not acting, or leaving alone, is also a form of collaboration.
Then more things began to appear on the altar. Little items that other neighbors would leave. Unicorns and gnomes. Googly eyes and skeletons. Stones and more stones. Beads. Items imbued with meaning, or just something someone had lying around that they could contribute. Contributions. A focal point.
Magic spilled from this space. It was created and spun there, reaching out beyond the altar.
It had caught on that it was a place of reverence, a place to leave treasures, a place for stopping, for pausing, for noticing, for delighting, for generosity. The altar inspired giving, the altar inspired stopping, which in itself is a generous act in our never-stopping world. A point of reciprocity, of giving without expectations of receiving anything in return.
She delighted in seeing neighbors stop as she looked out her window. There was a family with children who walked by some evenings, and she could tell they too delighted in stopping. She was pretty sure they must've been leaving things, maybe the rubber skeletons. She loved that it had become a point of delight for others. She watched the generosity, the reciprocity, the stopping and appreciation, grow.
Then one day, she found out she had to leave. She got a job - a dream job - and had to move halfway across the world to another country. She was sad to leave the tree altar but knew it would continue its place in the community.
One day, while she was packing to move, she was cleaning out her desk. She got rid of some papers and put them in the recycling bin. When you are moving, you need to consolidate.
Later that day or the next day, in the evening she came home. It was dusk, and it had been a windy day again. The recycling was a week late being picked up (note: another collaboration!) and the bin was full, so some papers had blown out of the bin. She got out of the car and looked across the street and saw the wind had blown a piece of paper to the base of the tree altar. She went to look.
It was a paper of a prayer her mom’s friend had written down for her. A prayer for peace. It read:
My prayer
Today I accept peace within me. I am
Not alone.
I am exactly where I am meant to be
I trust and surrender to my higher powers
I am focused on the infinite possibilities waiting for me as I create my future.
I am a child of God.
My soul is free to sing and dance.
It is my divine right to enjoy my life, be grateful, surrender to my higher powers, accept healing, forgiveness, joy, and love from the world and within myself.
This was the magic of the tree altar. Taking a message out of the recycling bin and returning it to be received again. A message from the wind, returning to meet the moment. From her dead mother saying hello, from her mother’s friend. This was its collaborative power. The magical power of paying attention, honoring, and reciprocating. The magic coming full circle, from the beginning seeds from the bouquet honoring her mother’s passing to the return of this note.
After she left, the tree altar was now a memory of the tree, and a memory of her, of her mother, that she and her family had been there and had loved the tree and that place. Her friend would stop by and leave things and take pictures for her, so she could see the changes, what had been added. When she returned to visit some months later, she didn’t have the chance to stop by to see it- her daughter got sick and they spent the whole trip in the hotel room. But she left some coins from the country she came from with her friend to place on the altar for her, hoping her neighbors would notice it was a little sign from her.
The next spring, she received a message from one of her old neighbors, Mary:
They cut down some trees in the median and removed the tree altar ;-( …oh well...I sure hope the remaining trees grow tall and strong! guess you'll have to come back and build another one somewhere in our neighborhood.
But she knew she didn’t have to go back, that the magic of the tree altar was just now dispersed, non-local. It would manifest again when the causes and conditions were right and ripe, likely in a different form. But it was an experiment in magic and collaboration, and it had taught her so much, and she was grateful. She bowed in gratitude in the direction of the tree altar, now in all directions.
Reflections
The tree altar taught me so many things: about our collaboration with the more-than-human world, about the magic available when we pay attention, about enchantment. When we watch and attend to the world around us. When we are in conversation with it. When we honor it. Respect it.
Nature is listening. Nature is yearning for us to pay attention, to be in conversation. Everything around us is. Children know this instinctively. They talk to plants and animals and rocks just as they would talk to anyone else. “Hello tree! Hello bird!” They sing to the plants and animals. Somewhere along the way we forget - some of us, anyways - perhaps after our schooling teaches us that nature is dead matter.
I return to the question: What is the wisdom and knowledge we need at this moment? Perhaps it is the wisdom of altars. It is the wisdom of treating life as sacred, of mourning its loss when it happens, whether naturally or otherwise. It is the wisdom of imbuing our spaces with beauty, and knowing that when we do this, something else, unseen, unspoken, may reach back out to us, may respond. It is the wisdom of learning to pause, to notice a tree stump, to honor its existence, to mourn. To remark at the wild collaboration that is happening within us - yes, directly inside us, with the bacteria in our guts and the air in our lungs and the food in our bellies and on and on - all the time. The sacredness of this collaboration. To be in awe of it. To sing back to it. To make offerings.
I frequently confuse the spelling of altar – a religious or spiritual offering space - and alter – to change, transform, in small but significant ways.
To alter is to change or transform in small but significant ways.
The tree altar changed us. Altered us. It changed me, and my relationship to that space, that land, my neighborhood, that community, in small but significant ways. It was a space for offerings. The way it responded reminded us that we are in a co-creative dance with the natural and more-than-human world. If we call out and we listen with our whole being, we may get a response. But we need to be listening for it. We need to pay attention.
An altar serves as a space to gather attention, and perhaps what we need so deeply now are spaces as such, where we can rest a collective gaze, where we can place our attention for any length of time longer than a scroll. Returning to the classroom teaching this year, what strikes me the most after 6 years mostly outside it (or in the role of student) is how distracted we all are, how hard it is for people to focus. The altar is a gathering point, a point for gathering attention. A reminder of the simple sacred. That beauty, magic, mystery, enchantment, and collaboration are all around us if we choose to pay attention.
Epilogue
On the day of Jupiter moving into Taurus, on our little campus in rural Costa Rica, our department gathered and walked towards the woods to have a ceremony honoring the transition. My friend and colleague was leading the charge, walking in a very determined way, like she knew where she was going. Suddenly, we stopped, and there at the edge of the forest was a stone pedestal. None of us had seen it before. It was cracked and mossy, plants growing around its base as if it had been there for a long time, slowly starting to be consumed by the forest as the forest does here in the tropics.
It was asking for offerings. And thus began our new altar, the pedestal in the forest. We placed our offerings and shared our intentions, aligned ourselves with the energy, and asked for collaboration, guidance, support, abundance, for our community to thrive. We have left flowers and ceremonial burnings of letting-gos and solstice blessings. We are nurturing a relationship with this place. It is not as heavily trafficked as the median on Cascade, but we are sure that collaboration will ensue. It already is.
References
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2015. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.
Knox Steiner, Stephanie Marie. 2022. Decolonial, Pluriversal, Vitality-centered Pedagogies: (Re)orienting Education Toward Serving Life. Pacifica Graduate Institute: Doctoral Dissertation.
Nhat Hanh, Thich. 2012. The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings. https://plumvillage.org/mindfulness/the-14-mindfulness-trainings
Not me crying over here 10 minutes away from Cascade Avenue, wishing some googly eyes, coins, and beads were still pressed into splintered wood along the median. :-( This is a beautiful tribute to the magic you created and the altar that altered your neighborhood.
<3 JBB