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Trees of Time: How Old is Old Growth? AMC Outdoors, September 2000 By Michele Pavitt Old-growth forests appeal to the intellect of man — their age, biodiversity, and ecological uniqueness raise a host of questions for scientists. But for many who visit them, these centuries-old wild places also speak to the soul. In his writings on old-growth spirituality, scholar Michael Perlman offered examples of images of ancient forests in poetry, novels, films, and legends. He wrote of trees as compelling symbols whose "form and physiology so artfully bring together upper and lower worlds." The trees spend centuries reaching toward the light, he suggested, but then graciously surrender to the processes of the dark — the unflattering reality of becoming hole-ridden, bug-eaten, and ultimately just a lump on the forest floor. One lesson of the forest is surely the interdependency and cyclical nature of life, said Perlman, who died in 1998. "To imaginatively follow old-growth trees must mean articulating and celebrating a spirituality open to decay, hospitable to a multitude of foreign beings that transform heartwood into food for the forest. A nurse-log spirituality," he wrote in Eastern Old-Growth Forests. Perlman's insightful, upside-down look at spirituality rings true with the ancient forest I toured with David Publicover, the AMC's forest ecologist. There, death coexists peacefully with life — and the darkness feels as holy as the light. Native Americans have also long been students of the spirituality of forests. During the thousands of years they've inhabited the North American continent, they've developed careful observation skills that allowed them to live in harmony with nature, said Jani Leverett, a woman of Cherokee-Choctaw heritage who teaches and writes on Native American issues and is married to old-growth specialist Robert Leverett. "It's a very intuitive process. As you work in the natural world, you become more attuned," she says. "There were observations they [her ancestors] gathered over hundreds of years — they observed the sky, the setting of the sun, the cycles of the moon." Jani Leverett has written of the central place of trees in the legends of the Native American people. For example, the Abenakis of the area now known as Vermont believe they descended from the ash tree. Cherokee legend states that fire was given to people from within a hollow sycamore tree. "We're taught we need to be respectful of every living thing. We cannot live in a perfect world. But we try — we don't know when we're going to go into spirit," she says. "If you find the time — make the time — to be in nature in its purest form, where you can go and sit by a stream or a forest and just observe the interaction you see, then you can incorporate that harmony into your own life." —Michele Pavitt is a freelance writer who lives in Brunswick, Maine. |
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