James Bridle’s book Ways of Being is a fascinating and enlightening read. If you’re interested in ecology, AI, intelligence, and consciousness (or any combination of those), I highly recommend it.
There is only nature, in all its eternal flowering, creating microprocessors and datacentres and satellites just as it produced oceans, trees, magpies, oil and us. Nature is imagination itself. Let us not re-imagine it, then, but begin to imagine anew, with nature as our co-conspirator: our partner, our comrade and our guide.
Trees are older than us (though not as old as you might think), longer-lived than empires, and deeply woven into the stories we tell about wisdom and spirit. They are teachers of patience and endurance, bearing witness to countless centuries of human seeking. Our ancient and modern columns of brick, stone, marble, or concrete still pale in comparison to our ancient tree kin.
Across traditions, trees have anchored human imagination. They serve as symbols of wisdom, life, and connection. However, more than symbols, they are living presences, mediators of the sacred. From Genesis to the Bodhi Tree, from Yggdrasil to the cottonwood of the Lakota Sun Dance, trees appear where human beings grapple with the mysteries of being alive.
The philosopher Owen Barfield once suggested that human consciousness itself has a history, that the way we experience the world evolves over time. He pointed to the so-called Axial Age, when religious and philosophical traditions in Israel, Greece, India, and China reimagined humanity’s relationship to the cosmos. Trees appear in those traditions as if marking the shift: not just as backdrops, but as active participants in our emerging sense of meaning. They carry forward the memory of the older ways of knowing, when spirit and matter were inseparable, and they gesture toward futures in which we might relearn that intimacy.
To pay attention to the trees is to pay attention to our own evolving consciousness. It is also to listen to what Donna Haraway calls “tentacular thinking,” the recognition that all beings are entangled in webs of relation, that meaning itself stretches across roots and fungi and soil and sky. Trees remind us that life is not linear but branching, not heroic but networked. They embody what Ursula Le Guin called the “carrier bag” story of humanity: not a single plot driven by conquest, but a gathering of seeds, fruits, and stories carried in community.
Tradition
Wisdom
Life
Spiritual Connection
Hebrew Bible / Judaism
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis); Etz Chaim (“Tree of Life”) as Torah/Wisdom (Proverbs 3:18)
Tree of Life in Eden and eschatology (Revived in apocalyptic visions)
Olive tree as Israel’s covenantal identity; sacred groves as contested spaces
Christianity
Cross as Tree of Life (Acts 5:30; 1 Peter 2:24); Hildegard’s viriditas (greening wisdom)
Tree of Life in Revelation (22:2) offers healing to nations
The Cross links heaven and earth; saints/monks often dwell in tree imagery of rootedness
Islam
Sidrat al-Muntaha (Lote Tree) marks the limit of knowledge (Qur’an 53)
Tree of Immortality in Eden (Q 2:35); olive tree as “blessed tree” (Q 24:35)
Trees as signs of God’s creation; paradise described as filled with shade-giving trees
Hinduism
Ashvattha (cosmic fig tree) in Bhagavad Gita represents eternal samsara
Banyan, neem, tulsi as living presences of the divine
Sacred groves; Bodhi tree as meditation site; cosmic tree with roots in heaven, branches on earth
Buddhism
Bodhi Tree: site of enlightenment, source of awakened wisdom
Trees as natural meditation sites; Bodhi tree as axis between ignorance and awakening
Indigenous Traditions (Americas, Africa, Celtic)
Oaks and yews in Celtic Druidic tradition as sources of sacred knowledge
Trees like baobab as “roots of life”; cottonwood in Lakota Sun Dance
World Tree as axis mundi (linking underworld, earth, heavens); trees as homes of ancestors/spirits
Norse Mythology
Yggdrasil’s roots drink from the Well of Mimir (wisdom)
Yggdrasil sustains nine realms of existence
Yggdrasil as cosmic axis, linking worlds; ravens, serpents, and gods interact with it
Chinese Traditions
Fusang tree marks sun’s rising, cosmic order
Peach tree of immortality (fruit of eternal life)
Sacred peach tree of Queen Mother of the West links heaven’s gifts with human fate
The Tree of Life in the Ancient Near East
The Hebrew Bible begins with a garden, and at its heart, two trees: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life (Gen. 2:9). To eat of the first was to awaken to wisdom — to the awareness of moral boundaries and human limitation. The story is often told as a fall, but it can also be read as the story of consciousness coming into its own, with trees as the threshold between innocence and maturity.
Proverbs later describes wisdom herself as “a tree of life to those who lay hold of her” (Prov. 3:18). Here the metaphor is clear: to live wisely is to be rooted, nourished, fruitful. In Jewish tradition, the Torah itself becomes the Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life, literally embodied in the wooden rollers of the scrolls used in worship.
But trees could also lead astray. The prophets railed against “sacred groves” where Canaanite deities were honored (Deut. 16:21). Yet, even this reveals the deep human instinct to find the divine among trees. And the symbol endures: the Book of Revelation imagines the Tree of Life restored in the New Jerusalem, its leaves “for the healing of the nations” (Rev. 22:2).
Christianity: The Cross as Tree
Christianity radicalizes the symbol by naming the cross itself a tree. The Apostle Peter writes that Christ “bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Pet. 2:24). A Roman instrument of execution becomes the world tree of redemption. The symmetry was irresistible to early theologians: where Adam and Eve grasped at fruit, Christ is lifted up on the wood, reversing the fall.
Medieval mystics expanded this imagery. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) described divine life as viriditas, “the greening power,” pulsing through creation. In her visions, the universe itself was a tree, verdant with God’s wisdom. Monks, too, saw trees as ascetic companions: silent, patient, enduring through storms.
For Christians, then, the tree is paradox. It bears death and life, judgment and mercy, sorrow and redemption. Like Yggdrasil, gnawed by serpents but still sustaining the worlds, the cross stands at the center of human story… fragile yet cosmic.
Islam: The Blessed Tree
In the Qur’an, trees shape both warning and blessing. Adam and Eve are commanded not to eat from the Tree of Immortality (Q 2:35). Yet another tree, the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary (Sidrat al-Muntaha), appears in the Prophet Muhammad’s night journey. It marks the furthest boundary of created knowledge: beyond it lies only God (Q 53:14–16).
The olive tree carries special significance. The famous Light Verse declares: “God is the Light of the heavens and the earth… lit from a blessed olive tree, neither of the east nor of the west” (Q 24:35). Here, tree and light merge: the olive, ancient source of fuel, becomes metaphor for divine illumination.
Paradise itself is pictured as a garden of abundant, shade-giving trees — a vision profoundly embodied for people whose daily lives knew desert heat. The tree is not abstract; it is rest, sustenance, and divine nearness.
Hinduism: The Cosmic Ashvattha
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna describes the universe as a cosmic fig tree, the Ashvattha: “With roots above and branches below, whose leaves are the Vedas; he who knows this tree is the knower of the Veda” (Gita 15:1). Unlike earthly trees, this one grows downward, its nourishment flowing from the eternal into the temporal. To attain liberation, one must cut it down with the “axe of detachment” and seek the source beyond appearances.
But trees are not only metaphors. Living trees are venerated: the banyan, with its aerial roots; the neem, with healing powers; the tulsi plant, tended in courtyards as a goddess in her own right. Sacred groves still shelter temples, holding ecological as well as spiritual memory.
The cosmic tree gathers together time, scripture, and existence. Like Barfield’s insight into symbolic consciousness, it points to a way of seeing in which reality itself is read as text, and trees as living letters of the divine alphabet.
Buddhism: Under the Bodhi Tree
Perhaps no tree is more famous than the Bodhi Tree under which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment. Sitting through the night, he confronted desire, fear, and illusion until he awoke into Buddhahood. Ever since, the Bodhi tree has stood as the site of awakening: wisdom that arises not from conquest but from stillness, from simply being present beneath a tree.
Buddhism also speaks of the Kalpavriksha, the wish-fulfilling tree, symbolizing abundance. Yet the Bodhi dominates the tradition’s imagination, embodying the dharma itself: impermanence in its falling leaves, interdependence in its roots, patient endurance in its trunk.
Like Le Guin’s “carrier bag” theory of narrative, the Bodhi tree is not a hero’s monument but a gathering site. Pilgrims circle it, meditate beneath it, collect its fallen leaves. It is not conquered; it shelters. It contains, carries, holds the story of awakening.
Indigenous Traditions: The World Tree
In Native American cosmologies, the World Tree or Sacred Tree connects earth, underworld, and sky. For the Lakota, the cottonwood chosen for the Sun Dance becomes the axis around which the world is renewed. Dancers tether themselves to it in prayer, embodying the life-giving bond between human and cosmos.
In Africa, great trees such as the baobab and iroko are revered as ancestors themselves, places of gathering, storytelling, and ritual. The tree is not a metaphor for community; it is the community’s center.
Celtic Druids likewise revered oaks and yews, holding ceremonies in groves. Mistletoe growing on oaks was especially sacred, believed to embody divine vitality. These groves were what Haraway might call “tentacular nodes,” entangled sites of relation where human, animal, plant, and divine life braided together.
Norse Mythology: Yggdrasil
Norse mythology centers its cosmos upon Yggdrasil, the great ash tree. Its branches span the heavens; its roots drink from wells of wisdom and fate. Odin, in search of knowledge, sacrifices his eye at the Well of Mimir. Later, he hangs himself upon Yggdrasil for nine nights to gain the runes. Wisdom here is costly, rooted in suffering and sacrifice.
But Yggdrasil is under threat. Serpents gnaw at its roots, Ragnarok looms, yet the tree sustains all realms. It is fragile and resilient at once, much like our own ecological situation.
Chinese Traditions: Trees of Immortality
In Chinese myth, the fusang tree in the east holds the rising sun, anchoring cosmic order. The peach tree of immortality, tended by the Queen Mother of the West, bears fruit every 3,000 years, granting eternal life. Pines, peaches, and cypresses all became emblems of endurance, long life, and the Dao’s flowing balance.
Here again, trees bridge the human and cosmic, marking time’s rhythm and pointing to the way of harmony.
Wisdom, Life, Connection
Stepping back across cultures, we see three recurring themes:
Wisdom: Trees stand at thresholds of knowledge — Eden’s fruit, Yggdrasil’s well, the Bodhi’s silence, the Sidrat al-Muntaha’s boundary.
Life: Trees embody vitality — food, healing, shade, immortality. Their seasonal cycles mirror death and rebirth.
Connection: Trees serve as axis mundi, mediators of heaven and earth, ancestors and descendants, divine and human.
But with Haraway and Le Guin in mind, we can say more. Trees are not just vertical axes; they are networks. They are “carrier bags” of biodiversity, gathering species in their canopies and roots. They are “tentacular,” stretching mycorrhizal threads through soil, binding together whole communities.
If earlier ages saw the tree primarily as a ladder to the divine, perhaps our age can see tree as a web, and recognize in that web our own entanglement with the more-than-human world.
Religious traditions often use trees to point beyond themselves, such as metaphors for wisdom, life, and connection. But metaphysics reminds us that this pointing is not merely symbolic; it reveals something of reality’s very structure.
For Alfred North Whitehead, reality is not made of inert stuff but of events, relationships, and becoming. A tree is not simply a “thing” but a nexus of processes: roots drawing up water, leaves breathing light, fungi threading connections underground. The tree discloses the metaphysical truth that being is relational, that life is constituted by giving and receiving.
Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy makes a similar point from a phenomenological angle: to encounter a tree is to recognize it as more than an object, but as a living subject with its own interiority, its own trajectory of growth and flourishing. The “tree of life” is not a metaphor we impose; it is a reality we meet.
This is where Owen Barfield’s insight comes in: the symbolic power of trees is not arbitrary but reflects the way human consciousness evolves in dialogue with the living world. We do not invent the tree-as-symbol; rather, the tree discloses meanings that consciousness gradually awakens to.
Conclusion: Listening Again
Religions around the world remind us that trees are more than scenery. They are wisdom keepers, givers of life, and cosmic connectors. They hold our evolving consciousness: from mythic imagination to axial philosophy, from medieval mysticism to today’s ecological science.
In a time of deforestation and climate upheaval, the old teachers still stand. They whisper lessons of rootedness, interconnection, and renewal. Perhaps the most spiritual act we can take is also the most practical: to plant, to tend, to listen.
The Ecology of the Cross: Cruciform Trees
If trees are life-givers, they are also sites of suffering. The cross itself was once a tree that was chosen, chopped down, shaped into an instrument of execution that was reused countless times in the Judean countryside of what we modern people of the inherited West would call the first century anno domini or Common Era. And yet in Christian imagination, it became the cosmic Tree of Life. This paradox lies at the heart of what I have been calling the Ecology of the Cross.
In ecological terms, forests today stand as cruciform realities: logged, burned, cut down, yet also central to the healing of the planet. The crucified tree is not only Christ’s cross but also the Amazon rainforest under chainsaw, the black walnut in my backyard enduring storms, the pines of South Carolina clear-cut for development, or the oak trees that are carefully manicured for aesthetic purposes in countless pieces of “property” surrounding churches here in what we now call the Southeast of the United States.
The Ecology of the Cross invites us to see cruciformity not only in human suffering but in the more-than-human world. Trees bear the wounds of our extractive systems, yet they also continue to gift us life: oxygen, shelter, shade, renewal. In this sense, the cross is ecological: a revelation of life’s pattern as death-and-renewal, as sacrifice-and-gift.
Here the metaphysical vision and the theological converge. To stand before a tree is to be confronted with both beauty and fragility, both gift and wound. It is to be drawn into what William Desmond might call the metaxological, the between, where mystery breathes through being.
So when religions speak of trees, whether as wisdom, life, or cosmic connectors, they are not only projecting human stories onto nature. They are intuiting something real about the metaphysical and theological shape of existence.
And in an age of ecological crisis, these intuitions call us back. To see a tree as a teacher is to see the world as sacramental, alive with wisdom and suffering, calling for care. To embrace the Ecology of the Cross is to recognize that redemption is not apart from creation, but through it… through roots and branches, crucifixion and renewal, leaves for the healing of the nations.
As Wendell Berry once urged, “Practice resurrection.” A tree knows how.
Notes
The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version (New York: National Council of Churches, 1989), Gen. 2:9.
The Holy Bible, NRSV, Prov. 3:18.
The Holy Bible, NRSV, Rev. 22:2.
The Holy Bible, NRSV, 1 Pet. 2:24.
Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990).
The Qur’an, trans. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2:35; 53:14–16.
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (London: Ignota Books, 2019).
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978).
Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989).
William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmer Poems (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2008).
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), esp. chs. on sacred trees and the axis mundi.
James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), selections on tree cults and sacred groves.
Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).
Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999).
John B. Cobb Jr. and Herman E. Daly, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
“This decision sends a clear message that environmental laws must be respected by leaders at the highest levels of our government — and there are consequences for ignoring them,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades.
“I was never against them renovating the park,” Marshall said. “My concern is how many trees have been cut down. … [Citywide] we have lost a lot of trees.”
Indeed, Columbia’s overall tree cover has shrunk. Between 2005 and 2019, the city lost 22% of its tree cover, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of South Carolina. The loss of tree cover plays a role in the city’s overall heat problems, which plague Columbia every summer.
Gary Perez and Matilde Torres—leaders in the Lipan-Apache Native American Church—challenged the City’s $7.75 million renovation of Brackenridge Park, alleging the work would destroy the “spiritual ecology” of their sacred riverbend by removing heritage cypress trees and deterring the migratory cormorants central to their creation story…
…Guideposts for Native and minority faith claims: The decision elevates the evidentiary threshold for showing a substantial burden where the state acts on its own land. Litigants must document direct, site-specific prohibitions rather than ecological or aesthetic degradation alone…
…Texas’s pandemic-era Religious-Services Clause, while “absolute and categorical,” is geographically—and now judicially—confined; policy makers retain authority to manage parks, rivers, and historic landmarks even when such management displeases worshippers…
I wonder how the decision would have fallen had this been in a “Christian” (under Texas-understanding) context…
Obsidian is my most used app on my laptops, iPad, phone, etc. and has been that way for the last few years between consulting, teaching, and working on my PhD (though you don’t need to do any of those things to appreciate Obsidian…).
It’s a deceptively simple app that I adore for many reasons. I’ve been writing papers and doing research since my college days in the late 90’s and I wish I had access to a good deal of that work these days. Unfortunately, wonky file formats (like Word over the years) or tech (looking at you, ZIP Drive) has relegated much of that to the aether before I realized the error of my ways and decided to start writing and jotting down electronic notes in more open formats (text files).
I run my consulting business off of Obsidian. All of my research and work on my PhD starts and is refined in Obsidian. Even my daily journaling has moved there (back to 2021 when I started using the platform).
I highly suggest you check out Obsidian whatever you do or write in this life… good podcast and interview here:
In Obsidian, files are Markdown-based, stored locally on your own devices, and completely free to use. You’ll hear Steph say that he doesn’t even know how many users Obsidian has or how sticky the software is, which is more or less unheard of among startups I cover.
For example, a pastor should be able to endorse a political candidate in a sermon, but not if that sermon is posted on a church website. Nor should the pastor’s church be allowed to publicly campaign for a candidate.
Before there were roots, there was the clay, packed and wet in the slow years when streams carried the silt down from far-off ridges in the old Appalachians and laid it here, flat and patient.
The boy kneels now, in the season where the heat already presses on the back of his neck. His fingers slip into the soil, seeking the thin stems that rise like stubborn thoughts along the ditch. He pulls, and the roots resist. They always resist.
On the porch, the old man watches from the chair his father once sat in, the cane legs sinking into the same warped boards. The boy is his grandson, though in the way of land and time, he is also his own shadow from fifty years ago, pulling at the same ditch bank under a sun that never moves far enough to matter.
“They’ll come back,” the old man calls.
It is not advice. It is history.
“They’re weeds,” the boy answers.
It is not certainty. It is inheritance.
The old man has pulled these plants before, each spring, each year, each turn of rain and drought. He has pulled them while young enough to curse them, while old enough to bless them, and now old enough to know the difference is only in the saying.
Beneath them, the roots speak in their human-silence, threading the years together. They remember hooves pressing down before the fences came, remember the shade of trees cut for corn, remember the long, narrow shadow of the railroad cutting across the horizon. They remember the boy before he was a boy (a bundle of blood and possibility) and the man before he was a man, his hands just as quick to bruise as to plant.
“You ever ask them why they’re here?” the old man says, though he’s not sure if he’s speaking to the boy, or the boy he once was, or the ditch itself.
The boy thinks it’s a joke and laughs, but the sound falls against the quiet. His fingers are still buried in the clay. He feels the rough threads of roots giving way one at a time, as though they are choosing to leave.
“These,” the old man says, taking one from the pile, “feed the rabbits in February. Keep the soil from running when the rains tear the ditch raw. Hold the heat for the bees when the frost breaks too soon.”
The boy pictures the field without them. Bare ground in February. Mudwater runs into the creek. The bees are circling an absence.
Somewhere far off, a train moves through the loblolly pines. Its sound folds into the wind, and just for a moment, the boy feels the years loosen, the past and the now running side by side like the ditch water after rain.
“What do we do with them?” he asks.
And the answer comes from all directions… from the old man, from the wind through the tall trees, from the roots beneath him: