I spend a lot of time at home alone, especially in the evenings. My husband has his own business and it often requires that he meet with his clients after their work hours. I don’t particularly mind. I’m an introvert and I often have papers to grade while listening to a TV mystery in the background. It’s one of the more mysterious aspects of my character that I’m a vegetarian who’s been known to save worms off the sidewalk, but I don’t mind murders or shootings on television. We’ve finally chalked it up to the years of vivid nightmares I’ve had. So as long as all the animals are okay on television, so am I.

Anyway, I’m here at home alone, looking out my window at a sea of other city windows. Seattle is currently the fastest growing city in the U.S., and I can tell just by the number of cranes within my field of vision. It’s pretty cool, all that life out there, throbbing and pulsing over the pavement. We have easy access to public transit, we’re centrally located, and I believe in the importance of urban densification. I have to admit though, that I really miss trees, and songbirds, and flowers. I don’t miss grass. I mowed lawns for my father’s landscaping business for seven years as a kid. Grass requires a lot of water and toxic herbicides and constant mowing using equipment that generally runs on fossil fuels. You can keep your damn grass. But I do miss trees.

In a purely spiritual way I don’t fully understand what it is that makes trees so special. Even an artist-type like me sees the scientific benefits such as oxygen production, carbon sequestration, and prevention of soil erosion, but that’s not why I have a visceral connection with them. They do change colors with the seasons, and that resonates deeply with my sense of the passage of time. They provide shade, and not the flat, achromatic shade of man-made structures. Their shade is alive, dappled and musical, just like the wind in their leaves.

I was walking across campus the other morning, the first morning when the temperature hit freezing. The massive chestnuts and oak trees on our campus loop had starting shedding their leaves like flower petals at the end of their blossoming. Great, golden snowflake-petal-leaves drifted steadily down to the constant whispering of their own departure. A shard of sunlight lit strips of them in radiant, visual song. I will hold that vision always, as a meeting with something divine. God was there in that moment and so was I, becoming just by being there, more of who I truly am.

One of the greatest of our campus trees was removed while I was away one summer. It was dying of old age, creating a potential hazard for students. I have grieved its loss ever since, as I have also grieved for the sweetness of the old cherry tree outside my classroom window. I used to stand still under its blooming branches and stare up into all its glory. Petals were under my feet, and dancing overhead. They made the sky soft and if I’d been the weeping kind, I would have wept under that tree. Sad and happy and lifted from mundanity into a perfectly reasonable suspension above earth, I would feel hope on my worst days.

Environmentalists are often referred to as tree-huggers in a confusingly disdainful way, as though hugging trees were some sign of dementia. I’ve never been offended, personally, taking it as a reference to sensitivity. While being sensitive can be painful, I’d never trade it for a more comfortable disconnection.

As I’ve been teaching this quarter about the connection between environmental care and faith, I’ve been thinking a great deal about Saint Francis. I don’t know very much about very many saints, I must admit, being raised a fundamentalist evangelical; that’s fodder for a different blog entry. I have heard of St. Francis, though, and I love him. Reportedly, he’d go out into the fields and preach to the birds and the trees. “Sing!” He’d proclaim to the birds. “Sing what’s in your heart and be fully alive, yourselves. In doing so you praise your God.” And “Clap your hands, you trees! Bear your fruit and your nuts. Grow bark and rustle leaves and dapple the ground with everything you were made to be! You bring worship to God who made you!” The townspeople generally thought he was nuts, but I love that man. He speaks my heart from the past and tells me that yes, God is in the trees. And to all you theologians out there, no, I don’t believe he’s limited to being a tree although I do think he could inhabit a tree as easily as he inhabits any human. Trees bring a unique representation of his character to life. They reveal his love, his beauty, his constancy, and his ever-changing breeze.

One day I’m going to look out the windows of my home and see trees that don’t look like children’s toys. I will hear their leaves speaking to me, and I will feel that deep sense of serenity their voices bring. For now, I’ll be an unabashed tree-hugger on campus. I could hardly be a good example to my students if I weren’t. I could hardly be myself.