3:34pm July 7, 2014

Another possibly surprising way I see myself as conservative.

I also consider my religious beliefs extremely conservative in many ways. Which may again sound like a strange thing. Most people don’t consider worshipping a redwood forest (a crude but fast way of describing my primary religion – here is an ask I answered about it) to be something a religiously conservative person would do. My conservative Christian relatives would be horrified, and probably are horrified if they keep up with my blog enough to read about my religious beliefs and practices. I was not brought up conservative Christian, but many of my relatives were, and remain so.

But there are different types of conservative. Conservative Quakers, for instance, are conservative in the way that they practice their brand of Christianity, but are not necessarily politically conservative. This confuses people a lot. They are conservative because they hold to an older standard of conduct than other Quakers, not because they necessarily have conservative politics. There are all kinds of meanings for the word conservative.

The reason I consider my religious beliefs conservative, is difficult to explain. I have no tradition of human beings passing on the traditions over the generations. I have no tradition of human beings at all. I have learned my religion from the plants, from the soil, from the trees, from the mycelium, from the mold, and from the slugs. I have learned it from the things that live there. I learned it because I was born there, I lived there during a very sensitive period of my childhood when I was prone to absorbing such information, and it settled down into my bones, into parts of me that are deep and dark and unseen. I was at an age where sensing was my only mode of understanding the world, and that meant I absorbed and resonated with everything with an intensity that has never left me.

But I consider it conservative because it’s something that goes back a very long time. It may not have a long line of human practitioners, but as a human I am only one piece of a larger whole. And that larger whole has been doing what it’s doing for centuries if not millennia. It’s simply invited me to be a part of something that’s been ongoing for possibly longer than humans have been around. To me, that’s conservative: preserving existing traditions, avoiding unnecessary change.

The fact that the traditions may not be human traditions doesn’t make me feel any more like what I’m doing is something novel. In fact, since writing about this, I have been contacted by other people who have had similar ‘religions of one’ tied to specific places, dealing with the natural world, and seemingly being invited by that part of the natural world to be a part of something ongoing, rather than making it up as we go along. It seems to me there must be people all over the world doing this, singly or in groups, tied to particular places, whether physically located in that spot or from a distance.

So I’m conservative because I’m preserving a tradition that goes on, frankly, further back than I can even imagine. I don’t pretend that I’m practicing something that’s been handed down by humans for that long. But I do feel like the forest has been this way for a very long time, and to have been a part of it when I was born, when I was young and impressionable, is to be a part of it for life. I am under its protection for as long as I live, no matter where I go. And I might not be as long-lived as some of the things in the forest, and I might be way more long-lived than others. But the forest itself, overall, has been passing these things down in the way forests do, for a very, very long time. And that’s why it feels conservative and traditional, even if the traditions being conserved aren’t wholly for humans. They’re for everything that lives there, humans included.