The spiritual life of many cultures is, well, rooted, in tales of trees.

The Tree is Home. In the earliest myth recorded in stone, the Sumerian story of Inanna, the queen of heaven and earth is splashing through the Euphrates when she finds a tree floating in the water. She brings it ashore so that it can become her "shining throne" and her "shining bed". Far away, in Nordic country, the Tree of Life (left), Yggdrasil, houses all the world in its branches, trunk, and roots. Even the future is contained in Yggdrasil.

The Tree Witnesses the Journey to Wisdom. The Bodhi tree, under whose branches the Buddha was sitting when he attained enlightenment, is still a place of extreme sacredness after twenty-five centuries. It is said that if you stand on that place and take the Bodhisattva vow or make prayers to attain Buddhahood for the benefit of all beings, you will never be reborn in the lower states.

The Tree Shelters Spirits. Trees are a favorite resting place of spirits. The Celts saw trees as magical beings who bestowed blessings on earthly people from the world beyond. Even in modern Ireland, one lone hazel tree has improbably been allowed to remain standing on a small grassy island of its own in the middle of a busy highway, since it is reputed to be a favorite meeting place of the fairies of Munster and the fairies of Connaught.

The Tree Is a Teacher. A Yurok elder advised: "When you can see each leaf as a separate thing, you can see the tree; when you can see the tree, you can see the spirit of the tree; when you can see the spirit of the tree, you can talk to it and maybe begin to learn something."

In celebration of his 29th birthday Noah Crowe went underground. Not politically--botanically. Inspired by the twentieth century German artist, Joseph Beuys, who declared that art, the environment, and the human community are linked, Noah created a ceremony that would connect the occasion of his birth with the life-giving force of the Earth.

First he visited several nurseries until he found a native California oak close to his own height of 6'2." Next he collected 13½ gallons of water, equal to the amount of water in a person his size. Finally, like Beuys, whose "7,000 Oaks" project paired each tree he planted in Kassel, Germany with a column of basalt stone, a marriage between the ever-changing and the never-changing, Noah chose a large rock for his tree.

On the afternoon of April 14, around the time his mother would have been going into labor, he and his friend Shawn drove out to the site of the ceremony, a small, littered wasteland by the off-ramp of the expressway between Los Angeles and Ventura. Noah dug a hole in the ground, and at 4:47 PM, the exact time of his birth, he undressed and lowered himself into the hole. Shawn shoveled in the soil. Below the waist, Noah was rooted in the earth. The upper part of his body branched into the air. His intention was to stay in the hole until morning, but when Shawn arrived at 1:00 AM to check on him, he was shivering with cold and they agreed that it was time for him to emerge. He then planted the tree in the hole he had warmed for it and poured the water into it. He placed the stone a few feet from the tree.  

Through this embodied rebirth Noah relived his true roots and gave new life to a broken down place.

When a 300-year-old white oak, the oldest tree in Howell County, Missouri, started to split right through the middle, a group of women got together to do an Earth Exchange for it. They stood on two sides of the tree and stretched out their hands towards one another through the middle. "We filled the tree with our voices," said Lois Reborne. Photo by Sasha Daucus,  Golden Light Center, Doniphan, MO.

The last great elm standing on the hill in Speicher, northeastern Switzerland, commands the attention from far away. Carla Planzer, a middle school teacher and artist, however, prefers to spends time with it up close. With her dog Karo she often goes to visit the tree to talk to it, hug it, and lean back against it. Sometimes she takes her grandchildren there to nestle among the roots and have a picnic lunch. For her Global Earth Exchange in 2011 Carla, her husband, and the dog visited the tree and expressed gratitude that it has remained standing when so many of its kind have fallen. They sat in the roots and peered up through the branches to the lace of sky and clouds. They listened to the wind stroking the leaves. "We gave our elm strength and energy," Carla wrote. "She led our energy into it and I felt my connection with her."

This beautiful old white pine is probably 300 years old. Every year since 2000, vision questers on the annual Endless Mountains Vision Quest have gathered under the branches on the day after their solo to tell their stories of what happened during their time alone, what they learned, what they let go of, what they took on. 2013 will be the last year of the Endless Mountains Vision Quest, but I like to think that the stories are embedded in the sap, the wood, the very rings of this great tree. 

Maila Davenport has a vision of communities all around the world becoming "resilient and awake" through the creation of sacred places. A cultural psychologist and executive director of Altar Places, Maila sees people and places as intimately connected, and her mission is to inspire communities to re-claim, re-shape, and re-story those places for the well being of both. They will do so, she believes, not by setting out to invent new myths and archetypes but by revealing the ones currently pulsing below the surface of consciousness.

At present she is developing a cross-cultural project called "10,000 World Trees." The World Tree, a symbolic representation and psycho-spiritual blueprint of life, is a sacred tree that contains all of life, sacred and profane, positive and negative. "Imagine," Maila writes, "communities once again re-aligning with this deep, archetypal Belonging; threshold for people right where they live to heal [both] the land and displacement of the people."

She launched 10,000 World Trees in her own front yard on the day of the Winter Solstice, 2012. A total of 24 people participated in the event at her home in Portland, Oregon by making god's-eyes and other items with which to decorate a tree. They then wrapped the tree and made offerings and prayers to it. For several weeks, neighbors and friends visited the tree and made contributions of their own. The ceremonial garb has since been removed, but the tree continues to hold a palpable new energy.

I am looking at trees

they may be one of the things I will miss

most from the earth

though many of the ones I have seen

already I cannot remember

and though I seldom embrace the ones I see

and have never been able to speak

with one

I listen to them tenderly

                                                        their names have never touched them

     they have stood round my sleep

     and when it was forbidden to climb them

     they have carried me in their branches

Bali was under Dutch occupation at the beginning of World War II, but when Japanese troops landed on the beach of Sanur in 1942, the Dutch fled. After Japan surrendered in August 1945, the Dutch returned to reclaim their lost colony. By that time, however, Indonesian nationalists had declared their independence and proclaimed the country of 17,000 islands a Republic. On Bali, a group of patriots led by I Gusti Ngurah Rai rallied forces in November 1946, determined to chase the Dutch off their island.  

The plan backfired and about four dozen Balinese patriots ended up fleeing the Dutch through the mountains of north Bali. They had no weapons, only bamboo poles and the sharp bladelike leaves of a native plant. They knew the land so well, however, and had so much support from the local people, that their retreat became a legend. They slashed the bamboo bridges the Dutch would cross, sheltered in homes and animal pens, and traveled at night. Finally, as the Dutch gained on them, they hid among the branches of this gigantic banyan tree.  

Eventually, all the patriots were killed, but to the Balinese people the uprising was an important moral victory. The banyan tree, the biggest in Bali is a sacred place now, with its own temple.

(On our Bali from Within journey, we take a hike through forests and rice paddies to visit this tree.)