If you are beginning to notice individual trees while walking through the forest of my words and the individual spirits of those trees, blessings on you and please consider the following. I will reference several published books to gently take my musings out of the drawing room and place them in their correct setting. The painfully gathered, precious accumulation of human knowledge of reality, evident in folk cultures and now preserved in academic studies, is yet still visible to those who can see.
While in Vancouver for the Spring, Summer and Autumn of 2021 with my third wife, Nisa and I frequented Spanish Banks. One chemo therapy afternoon, Nisa gathered a half-dozen tidal pool crabs to bring to our room at the Easter Seal House for pets. What could I do?
There on a window ledge, in a butter tub habitat, they bubbled, scratched and scuttled all night. In the morning after an exceedingly odd dream, I was challenged in the bathroom by a tiny crustacean Squire brandishing his claws as I shaved. Another scampered over my bare foot at the breakfast table. I gathered them all with chopsticks and released them into the food chain that day.
Soon after, as a surprise for the little girl that lives inside my sixty-nine year-old Nisa, I took her to an aquarium shop on Main St. And Fifty-First. I bought a tiny square glass vessel, a single aquatic plant and two small goldfish to smuggle into the Easter Seal House. One Fantail died after a two weeks and I replaced it with a beautiful tiny orange Platy with jet-black lips and tail. Nisa named her new fish, Whoopee Goldfish. The remaining Fantail joined the first and alone, Whoopee began to grow in earnest. Her brilliant warm orange form circling her home tree each morning became a welcome morning meditation. She lives now with my sister April and has tripled in size.
While walking around the Punjabi Market district on Main St. near the fish store, we happened upon the tree pictured in the Liminal section of this website. It had been there for all the years we had lived in the area, but this time it was decorated with saffron garlands in massive long threads hung from high branches imperceptibly caressing the heads of passers by. I imagined that in India, countless spirits peppered the sub-continent on it’s long sea voyage towards it’s collision with Asia, which any humans would have recognized and connected to through myriad localized religions. Those tribal beliefs would have melted unharmed into the welcoming masala of Hinduism and I suspected that even the modern Sikh religion cannot have always been unadorned by ancient local deities in rural, agricultural Punjab, particularly female ones.
This led me off on a google which confirmed, “Hindus consider all trees to have a tree deity, which can be worshipped and provided with offerings including water and sacred threads.” And that, “In Hinduism, Aranyani is a goddess of the forests and the animals that dwell within them.”
-Dwivedi, O. (1990) Satyagraha for conservation: Awakening the spirit of Hinduism. In Engel, J. & Engel, J. (eds.) Ethics of Environment and Development: Global Challenge, International Response. USA: University of Arizona Press.
I learned that, “Aranyani has one of the most descriptive hymns in the Rigveda. Indeed, Hymn 146 in the 10th mandala of the Rigveda, Aranyani Suktam, or Hymn to a Forest Nymph, describes her as being elusive, fond of quiet glades in the jungle, and fearless of remote places. In that hymn, the supplicant entreats her to explain how she wanders so far from the fringe of civilization without becoming afraid or lonely. She wears anklets with bells, and though seldom seen, she can be heard by the tinkling of her anklets. She is also described as a dancer. Her ability to feed both man and animals though she 'tills no lands' is what the supplicant finds most marvellous.”
- The Hymns of the Rigveda, Ralph T. H. Griffith, 1973. Hymn CXLVI, Page 640
- Muir, John (1870). Original Sanskrit Texts on the Origin and History of the People of India. London: Trubner and Co. p. 422.
I further learned that, “Marriage can occur between a human and a particular tree of the opposite gender. This is usually a practice that occurs after an individual has been married twice already, as a third marriage is seen as inauspicious and is also illegal in the Punjab. Therefore, instead of marrying a human for the third time, a Punjabi individual is married to a babel tree (Vachellia nilotica) and afterwards married to another human for the fourth marriage.”
-Haberman, D. (2013) People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India. USA: Oxford University Press.
I also find it to be marvellous that so many trees have granted me the ability to see glimmers of an unfiltered reality. Of course, it always is nice to know that one is not alone in one’s experiences, regardless of one’s birth language and cradle religion. May the process continue ever on. Indeed, any “she” can feed both man and animals without tilling any land and that simple, elegant, logical magic contains all that was once known, has repeatedly become lost and will always rise to nourish the portion of humanity that is willing to live in truth.
I pondered that the Kanaka Bar, Nlaka'pamux pine tree pictured in the Liminal section of this website with the inter-woven branches, that I met when I was about eighteen, may possibly be my marriage tree, as I did not find compatibility until my third wife, Nisa, who is surely auspicious.
I will add that while walking down Fraser Street several days ago in the dark to buy dinner for Nisa and I as we once again lodged at the Easter Seal House for her post transplant December check-up at VGH; a hooded, slight, female passed me in front of the Rokko Saree Store at Forty-Six and Fraser in the gathering gloom and in a jasmine sweet voice said, “Jingle all the way.”
My reply was, "ਸਤਿ ਸ੍ਰੀ ਅਕਾਲ ." "Sat Sri Akal." ("Truth is the Timeless One.’’)
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