There was a white pine tree, a giant, over a hundred years old, that stood beside a lake and grew in sandy soil. It was home to birds and insects and small mammals. For some of them, it was the whole world. For me and my colleagues and students, it was a place of quiet repose, an invitation into tree-time, into the jewel shades of lichen and topography of weathered bark, and into the wind becoming visible only as it coaxed the upper branches into dance. There, in the tree-crown kissing the sky, a place of perfect stillness and constant motion, a place that human eyes could see and love but never enter, I more than once saw a hawk or eagle alight and pause to look across the ground and water. A long-dead branch was caught high in the tree- crown, bleached white and shocking like a bone exposed against the gentle green. And so replete with life and full aware of its mortality, this tree announced with every motion, every slender twig and tapered needle, its own divinity. Benevolent, it gave nourishment, shade, shelter, and beauty, and scattered the sandy soil with its seeds. Its breath became our breath, and ours returned once more to it, strong and supple in the web of life and the peace of the Good Green Earth.

That land, a summer camp where I and my colleagues had taught for many years, part of the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, was sold in 2024 and was set to be portioned off for the construction of private vacation homes. We understood that, in building these homes, many of the trees would be cut down. On the night of the Summer Solstice in 2025, in our last weeks at that site, a tornado swept across the land. In all, it felled an estimated nine million trees in the Bemidji area. Of these, our beloved white pine was one. The morning after the storm, I stood within its tree-crown, that sacred, celestial, untouchable space, and breathed the spice of sap rising from the damp pale wood exposed where the bark had been ripped away. I walked around to its base where its ancient roots had rent the Earth as it fell and left a chasm. I took a fallen branch, heavy with sticky green unripe pinecones, to set upon my altar at home, to remember this god-tree, and to give thanks that it fell not to the chainsaw destined for it, but to the rain and the wind and the holy embrace of gravity.

Recording coming soon