Like Trees

Meditation on Psalm 1:1-3

Tell Me About Your Garden series:

First Presbyterian Church of Smithtown, NY

Pastor Karen Crawford

Feb. 16, 2025 (Prelude to Lent)

“When I rise up

let me rise up joyful

like a bird.

When I fall

let me fall without regret

like a leaf.”—Wendell Berry [1]

Thank you to the 15 gardeners, ranging in age from 51 to 102, for opening your homes and gardens to me and sharing your stories in the summer and fall of 2024 and as a group in spring 2025 for my doctoral project for Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Listen to the devotion through this link:

I went for a walk yesterday afternoon—before it snowed. I felt the need to be out with trees. It was cold outside, and the air was filled with the smell of wood burning in people’s fireplaces. I picked up a small branch from a blue spruce tree. I held it to my nose and breathed deeply. Ahh! The smell of fresh greens.

As I passed my neighbors’ homes, I admired the trees that lined the street. Some already had buds; others, I could see tiny leaves unfurling. As I walked, I turned my eyes to the tree canopy overhead. I marveled at the thought that trees intentionally reach out with their branches toward their tree neighbors, taking care to share the sunlight. German forester Peter Wohlleben says their roots reach out to one another, as well, and they share nutrients and important information about drought, animals and insect invasions, and more. When a tree is sick, it is often supported underground by neighboring tree roots that feed and nurse it back to health. [1] Another way trees communicate, Canadian professor of forest ecology Suzanne Simard learned, is through a shared fungal network underground. Nature magazine, publishing her findings in Aug. 1997, called the discovery “the wood-wide web.” [2]

I touched the fuzzy nubs of a pussy willow tree, stopped to take a picture. I remembered how my dad used to cut pussy willow branches and keep them inside the house in a vase all winter long. Like me, he was probably longing for spring. The fuzzy nubs stirred me to ponder, why do they call them pussy willows, anyway?

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden says these nubs appear at the “tail end of winter,” which is good news—that we might be at the tail end! “These soft silver tufts—as well as the plant itself—are named for their resemblance to tiny cats’ paws, and they feel so much like fur that young children often wonder if they are animals instead of plants.” 3

I caught sight of the bare places in my next-door neighbor’s yard, where about a half dozen mature trees used to thrive. When they were cut down, and the logs laid on the street, waiting to be removed, I mourned. Every time I looked at the logs and the fresh stumps, I hurt. When I asked why he cut down the trees, he said, “They were just too big.” I couldn’t think of anything to say, except that it was a shame. They were beautiful, healthy trees. But he didn’t want to live in a forest. I do!

Several of my gardening friends are tree lovers, like me, even though dense trees can create too much shade for sun-loving vegetables and flowers. Belinda and Brad planted a forest—50 Western Red Cedars—in their backyard to “create a peaceful, park-like solitude. Our little oasis,” Brad said. Another gardener, Kaitlyn, said her father passed on his love for trees to her. She planted a Redwood. She gave me a book about forest bathing or shinrin-yoku, and I learned that spending mindful, intentional time with trees not only lifts your spirits; it brings healing. Dr. Qing Li, Chairman of the Japanese Society for Forest Medicine, says many of us suffer from technostress, coined in 1984 to “describe unhealthy behavior around new technology… Symptoms run from anxiety, headaches, depression, mental fatigue, irritability, and loss of temper.” 4

Another gardening friend, Betsy, shared her frustration when the town cut down the mature Norway maple trees that lined the streets of her development when they were replacing sidewalks and curbs and resurfacing the road. Sure, they planted new trees, smaller ones of a different variety; the ones they destroyed were simply in the way.

Pat, her mother, said she had a similar experience as mine with a next-door neighbor cutting down mature, healthy trees so that they would have more grass, maybe for the children.

Didn’t they know that children love trees? They sure did when they came to the Sunday School picnic at the manse.

When Pat shared the story, I could hear the pain in her voice. Grass doesn’t provide food or shelter for birds and squirrels and other wildlife like trees do. Grass doesn’t give us fruit, nuts, and seeds to eat. Grass doesn’t clean the air we breathe. “A tree has the ability to provide an essential of life for all living things on our planet – oxygen, and the power to remove harmful gases like carbon dioxide.” 5. Grass doesn’t provide shade or privacy or the sounds of leaves whispering in the breeze. Grass doesn’t give off a sweet aroma like so many trees. Trees can live hundreds, even 1,000s of years, surviving droughts, storms, heat, and cold. They grow very slowly, but they last a long time. Old Tjikko, a Norway spruce in Sweden, is the oldest known living tree in the world, at about 9,567 years old. 6

It’s no secret that people long ago had a closer relationship to God’s Creation. People today may be suffering from what Celtic teacher John Philip Newell calls “soul forgetting.” “We have forgotten who we are,” he says, “and have fallen out of true relationship with the earth and one another. Thus, the path to well-being is not about becoming something other than ourselves or about acquiring a spiritual knowledge that is essentially foreign to us. It is about waking up to a knowledge that is deep in the very fabric of our being, and it is about living in relationship to this wisdom.”7 Norman Wirzba, Duke University professor of theology and ecology, calls it “ecological amnesia.” [8 Like Newell, Wirzba says this growing separation from the land has led to a growing separation from people.

And that brings me to Psalm 1, when the writer urges us to live in harmony, in good relationship with one another and refrain from sitting at the seat of scoffers. We all have been around scoffers before. Pretty soon, everyone sitting with scoffers are miserable. No, God’s people are urged, instead, to take delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on it, day and night. The psalmist reveals his close connection to God’s world when he says, “They are like trees, planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.”

He might not have known, as scientists know today, that trees are more like us than we ever expected. In addition to the social aspects of trees in the forest—who live in family groups and communicate with other trees of the same species for miles around, and those who care for weaker, neighboring trees—trees also experience pain when trunks and roots are cut or leaves are eaten by animals and insects. Trees being eaten will respond by manufacturing a bad-tasting chemical that will eventually, in 24 hours or so, flow to their leaves and discourage any more animals from eating.

The psalmist might not have known that the roots of the tree he was noticing, growing by the stream, were reaching toward the water because they could hear the sound of the river! That’s right! Trees can hear. Additionally, physicists in France “discovered that trees make different sounds when they are starved for water versus when they are simply thirsty.” 9 Trees have voices!

The psalmist who admires trees with leaves always green, bearing fruit in season, might not have known that trees are good medicine for people like us, who spend most of our lives inside buildings.10 Those who make time to walk in a forest or just sit under the trees and practice shinrin-yoku or forest bathing experience increased energy and a stronger immune system and decreased anxiety, depression, and anger. 11 Dr. Qing Li writes,

“We are part of the natural world. Our rhythms are the rhythms of nature. As we walk slowly through the forest, seeing, listening, smelling, tasting, and touching we bring our rhythms into step with nature. Shinrin-yoku is like a bridge. By opening our senses, it bridges the gap between us and the natural world. And when we are in harmony with the natural world, we can begin to heal. Our nervous system can reset itself. Our bodies and minds can go back to how they ought to be. No longer out of kilter with nature but once again in tune with it, we are refreshed and restored. We may not travel very far on our forest walk but, in connecting us with nature, shinrin yoku takes us all the way home to our true selves.” 12

As we prepare to enter the season of Lent, I pray that you will join me on a journey to find our true selves, living in right relationship with God, one another, and all Creation. I pray you will read and meditate on Scripture, as the psalmist urges, and spend time with your Creator—outside your usual, indoor surroundings. I pray you will never sit in the seat of scoffers. And may we all recover a sense of wonder for God’s Creation that we might have forgotten somehow, some way. May we all be like trees.

Holy One, help us to be more like trees, bearing good fruit through loving deeds, caring for those weaker than we are, sharing nourishment and nursing the sick, communicating regularly with our siblings in the Lord, and remaining green and firmly planted in your Word, with our roots reaching out to the flowing waters of the Holy Spirit. Stir us to leave our familiar, indoor surroundings, to be with you in your wonder-filled Creation. May we become our true selves, as you have made us to be, throughout this season of Lent and beyond. Amen.

Wendell Berry from “Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer” in Giving Thanks, Poems Prayers and Praise Songs of Thanksgiving, edited and with reflections by Katherine Paterson, illustrations by Pamela Dalton (San Francisco: Handprint Books, 2013) 41.

2. Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from A Secret World (The Mysteries of Nature Book 1) (p. 3). Kindle Edition.

3. Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021), 165.

4. Ashley Gammell, “What Are Pussy Willows, Anyway?” Garden Stories at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, March 3, 2017, https://www.bbg.org/article/what_are_pussy_willows_anyway.

5. Qing Li, The Japanese Art and Science of Forest Bathing: How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness (NY: Viking, an imprint of Penguin, Random House, 2018), 35.

6. Joanna Mounce Stancil, U.S. Forest Service, “The Power of One Tree: The Very Air We Breathe,” at the USDA blog, March 17, 2015, at https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/blog/power-one-tree-very-air-we-breathe#:~:text=A%20tree%20has%20the%20ability,the%20air%20we%20breathe%20healthier.

7. “Old Tjikko,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tjikko#:~:text=Old%20Tjikko%20is%20an%20approximately,individual%20tree%20of%20great%20age.

8. John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World (New York: Harper Collins, 2021) 6.

9. Norman Wirzba, “Reconciliation with the Land,” in Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation, a book he co-authors with Fred Bahnson, (IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 34.

10. Jacki Lyden, speaking with the lead researcher, Dr. Alexandre Ponomarenko, in “All Things Considerered” on a podcast of NPR, April 28, 2013, at https://www.npr.org/2013/04/28/179675435/the-sounds-of-thirsty-trees.

11. Li, 14.

12. Li, 64.

13. Li, 15.