5:11am May 26, 2014

What’s my religion? Ummm…. redwoods?

The redwood forest I lived in when I was young, and the redwood forest I lived in when I first moved out on my own, these are places that are sacred to me. And when I say sacred, I don’t mean in some kind of fluffy, new-age, tree-hugging way. I mean that they go right down to the core of my existence. They tell me who I am, what I am, where I come from, where I belong. I have a connection to these places that can never be broken.

Every last part of them shows me something about the way the world works. The soil is perhaps the most sacred part to me, because that is where death, decay, and birth happen, in a way that is so interconnected that you can’t have one without the other.

I don’t talk about my spiritual experiences much (because they’re private, because trying to put words to something that can never be words, ruins it). But they have sometimes involved a perception that I was the soil and everything in it, and I could feel all those processes of death and decay and rebirth happening inside of me, timelessly, wordlessly.

I guess you could say that my religion, if I could be said to have one, is based in the redwoods, sometimes in very specific parts of the redwoods. I worship the soil and the mist and the Mother Tree and the fungus and the moss and the redwood sorrel. This is not something I take lightly.

And this is not something I created for myself. Many times, I see people sort of designing their own religions, sometimes “nature-based” ones and sometimes other sorts of religions. And that’s fine if that works for you. But for me… this is based on experiences that have happened to me, not based on things I have thought up. As with many things in my life, it’s a bottom-up experience, not a top-down one. This is not me imposing my will on the world. This is the world working its way into my life on every possible level.

There are other religions that I draw inspiration from, including ancient pagan religions (some of the gods mesh well with the more analytical parts of my brain, and have formed relationships with me) as well as some of the Catholic and Anglican saints — Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Saint John of the Cross — and the early Quakers, as well as others. But if you want to look at the closest “religion” to the core of the way I experience the world, look at the redwoods. This religion/spirituality/whatever you want to call it, has no name, no rituals, no gods, but it has drawn me closer to That Which Has No Name than anything else, and in a more direct fashion. And each spiritual experience has led to lasting change, which is the mark of a real spiritual experience (as opposed to self-deception or worse). While I may draw inspiration from many religions, this seems to be the closest to a ‘core’ religion that I have.

So when I am looking at pictures of redwoods, and redwood forests, and the plants and animals and fungi that live and die in redwood forests, I am looking at things that are, for lack of any better word, a deep part of my religious practice. And the forest floor most of all. I know that things like this can sound ‘out there’, or like something made up by hippies, but this is not something I made up, it’s something that made me, and all I had to do was pay attention. It also runs far deeper — down to my bones, down to my soul — than anything I’ve seen from people who are making up something superficial because it sounds cool to engage in “nature worship”.

I sometimes say I’m sort-of-pagan, because I don’t know what else to call it. But mostly I don’t talk about it much. I sometimes recognize similar experiences in other people — I’m certain that my connection to the redwoods comes from just about exactly the same place as soilrockslove’s connection to the desert. But I’ve never heard a word for what this is, to have a spirituality that’s tied to a specific place, that does not come from any culture you’ve ever heard of, that seems to come from the place itself and the connections you have formed with it, and is there whether you acknowledge it or not. “Nature-worship” doesn’t cover it, although that’s how most people would certainly understand what I’m saying.

All I know is that this is right, this is what makes me whole, this is what guides me on every level throughout my life… and most importantly: This is something that has happened to me. This is not something that I have decided “And here’s what I think of this, and here’s what I think of that.” This is something where the meaning has been given to me directly through the way I experience these things, rather than something where I have deliberately sought out to create or find meaning. And it’s not like a one-time feeling of vague expansiveness in the presence of ‘nature’, it’s closer to having ties to a particular place that go as deep as your soul and create an ongoing, intense, demanding relationship with that place, that is as challenging and potentially terrifying as it is beautiful, as with all real spirituality regardless of the religion involved.

I know there must be lots of other people like me out there, both those who acknowledge these things have happened to them and those who are trying to ignore it. I assume some of them have managed to blend in with pagan communities, while others just don’t call it anything, don’t talk about it. I have never liked the pagan community that much. And I don’t normally talk about it — not directly. But I’m sure things like this have happened to others.

And those ties that have been created to that specific set of places… they seem to be no weaker for being far away from there in either space or time. Any time I want to, I can call on those connections. Sometimes I curl up in bed and the Mother Tree is with me, and I’m curled up at the base of it – and I don’t even know if, right this moment in time, the Mother Tree is alive or dead, but it doesn’t matter, because at some point in time it was alive, and that’s all it takes for the connection to exist. I can be here, and also be there, because the ties run deep and aren’t lessened by distance. Which is fortunate, because even though I would love to live right at the center of the place that is sacred to me, that will probably never happen again in my lifetime.

I do want my ashes to be taken there, though. And if I could, I wish I could die lying on the floor of the same forest I lived in when I was born. Of all the dreams I had about my impending death (back before the adrenal insufficiency was treated, when I stood a really good chance of dying, so I dreamed about death a lot), the best of them was one where I was still living there and asked my parents to carry me out and lay me on the forest floor so I could be there as I died. I would love to go out of the world so close to where I came into the world, in that place where every level of my mind, heart, and soul is bound to.