A Sacred Place?
A Sacred Place?
I suppose it might seem crazy for me to suggest that The Arboretum At Starin Park is a sacred place. After all, it’s is just a city park.
But I’ll call it sacred anyway.
For one thing, it’s an ancient place; the park’s big hill was created by a departing glacier 10 to 15 thousand years ago. A glacial kame, quite possibly.
It’s almost certainly a place visited by the first people—perhaps the Hopewell, certainly the Mound Builders, and likely the Potawatomi and Ho-Chunk. I try to imagine what it was like back then.
As UFC member Nick Alt has suggested, the stand of Norway spruce up to the west of the water tower was likely planted by European settlers to remind them of home.
And, even after the ravages of the emerald ash borer, the park is still home to over 700 trees, some of them well over a century old.
Trees have been held sacred in many cultures. There’s Yggdrasil, the sacred tree that supports the universe. There are warden trees, which defend against bad luck and evil spirits. There are the famous sacred oak groves of the Druids. There are the Ents of Middle Earth.
Just saying out loud the names of trees is a kind of poem—
oak, willow, ash, hawthorn, holly, hazel.
Or this line from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Counting Out Rhyme:
Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.
Trees are an essential element of our outer and inner lives. A first step as stewards of the earth is to learn about and then teach the sanctity and importance of trees—by respecting, planting, and maintaining them—appreciating all that trees do for us, in their silent, woody ways.
Clearly, trees have had great importance to the first people of Wisconsin, even to the extent that trees are thought of as Tree People.
But as poet and nature writer Gary Snyder says,
“we are all indigenous to this planet, this mosaic of wild gardens we are being called by nature and history to reinhabit in good spirit. Part of that responsibility is to choose a place. To restore the land one must live and work in a place. To work in a place is to work with others. People who work together in a place become a community, and a community, in time, grows a culture. To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture.”
Gary Snyder,
The Rediscovery of Turtle Island
A Place In Space, Counterpoint (1995)