The Birthday of the Trees

Photo by the author.

Tu B’Shevat, which is known as the “birthday of the trees” or “new year of trees” in Jewish custom, began at sundown tonight. It’s long been my personal favorite although it’s quite a minor holiday; I’ve always chalked this up to my midheaven Moon in Taurus (Mom’s a horticulturist and master gardener) giving me a bit of a tree-hugging dirt worshipper streak, but the sheer magnitude of Pacific Northwest geography instills a degree of love of nature and place in most people here. Today, being the new year of the trees, I’m going to shamelessly wax local a bit.

I spent some time “dowsing” for a new book in my friendly neighborhood woowoo bookstore a couple days ago, and was pleasantly astonished to find this:

Douglas Todd’s Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia: Exploring the Spirit of the Pacific Northwest is a collection of essays by regional and other authors that explores the unique threads of northwestern culture. I’ve hunted down many books that look at the area from a philosophical rather than a pop-culture viewpoint, but Cascadia, thankfully, is one of the few that does it without going too dryly academic.

Cascadia’s fifteen essays are divided among four areas: spirituality and values, history, nature, and culture. The overall point of the book is that here in the northwest these things are irretrievably connected, our soaring treetops and snowy peaks inspiring near-religious devotion and creating a sense of place that transcends even international borders.

One of Cascadia’s more famous/infamous statistics regards what godless heathens we are. Oregon, and Washington even more so, sport the lowest rates of religious identity in the entire US. This is still very much a spiritual place though- but collectively we’re as likely to get religion at the edge of the Pacific, atop a mountain, or under a canopy of Douglas fir as we are in a church or a temple. If you want to look at it in more irreverent terms, out here G-d’s architecture trumps man’s, hands down. Says historian William Cronon:

Wilderness fulfills the old romantic project of secularizing Judeo-Christian values so as to make a new cathedral not in some petty human building but in G-d’s own creation, Nature itself.

Mark Shibley’s essay finds local spirituality to be driven by the three clusters of apocalyptic end-timers, neo-pagans and assorted New Agers, and earth-based spirituality; he declares the last most central to the regional ethos, evoked locally in literature and secular movements as well as religious traditions. Shibley writes:

None of these spiritual practices is unique to Cascadia, but in the absence of a dominant religion, they define regional culture and identity more substantially than they do elsewhere. Put differently, “alternative spirituality” is more center-culture than counter-culture in our region.

I found this to be true even when I was in high school, where we had more students who were Wiccan or pagan (legitimately raised as such by their parents, not kids who read a few Anne Rice novels and got “inspired”) than Jewish. Nature and earth and trees and a certain level of reverence are woven into the fabric of everyday existence here. Take a look at this photoset from my daily commute from a couple years ago:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I didn’t walk a step out of my regular path for this, and this is in a fairly dense area of Seattle. Especially on the western side of the Cascades, there is an undercurrent of primal, even primordial, energy in green spaces. That primordial air is found in all corners of the northwest- places as geographically diverse as the coastal forests of southeast Alaska, hiking trails of the Olympics, Oregon’s Cannon Beach, the Columbia Gorge, and even the city parks of Vancouver, B.C. all evoke the same twinges of reverence that feed local souls.

Cascadia is a very readable set of essays, with several sets of maps and photos that nicely convey the regional ties. The book as a whole takes a more analytical, higher-altitude view of local environmental and spiritual practice than many locally-focused books, while retaining an authentic voice through its authors. Natives and curious outsiders alike will find it an engaging and worthwhile read.

Now that I’m all caught up with local fervor, I’ll leave you with a few of my other photos from the area. Enjoy!

Gasworks Park, Seattle

Mt. Index, Washington

Juneau, Alaska

Skagway, Alaska

Stanley Park, Vancouver B.C.

Lower Dewey Lake, Alaska

No related posts.