A sacred valley oak tree, the Nemeton of Phoenix Grove
Every third month or so, I go inward. I don’t post much, I don’t get involved or read human ‘tweets’, and I don’t accomplish much above ground. I’m apparently in that phase now. I’ve also had way too much work to accomplish in the grove and the mundane world to spend much time on this sort of thing.
There have been a rash of blog entries lately about the spirits and/or intelligence of plants, however, which has been nice to see. At No Unsacred Place and her own blog, Lupa went into plants as totems (specifically the fir tree), and links to another post on the pine tree as a totem. I’ve seen discussions on the oak tree as a symbolic totem as well, which reminded me strongly of the short but excellent treatment given to not just the power of symbols, but the need to believe in what they stand for in The Sacred Tree: Reflections on Native American Spirituality.
My question is why do every one of these recent posts have to mention that we generally pay no attention to the plants – specifically the oak tree that is the druidic totem par excellence? Why is it that “druids” spend more time with some dead Irish deity, who has gone below ground to get away from errant humanity, than with the oaks that have been our companions since the beginnings of real human civilization, and still are, despite every effort to kill them off? Why is it that when you search for the spirit of the oak online, you get the same twenty pages of results, all parroting the bullshit ogam or tree calendar nonsense? Why is it that the wiccans, following their rede, view the oak as useful only when they’re burning it or using its remnants (better than 84% of the time, in an analysis of the references at spellsofmagic.com)? The oak isn’t just a symbol. It is the original staff of life, and acorns are useful for more things than painting them gold as gambling charms. For instance, you can eat them. This is the problem of viewing everything as equal, and real objects as just symbols. Pretty soon, people have lost all conception of why the oak became a symbol of x, y and z, and start viewing the tree as nothing more than an entry in a book, where it is followed by a random assortment of what it “means”. Note, that particular book by Hopman is better than the one by Cunningham, but not by much.
People of the pagan camp often recoil at my use of the term fundamentalist in this blog. I’ve even heard in emails how they will not link to it for this very reason, but here’s my thing: The oak tree is the totem of every true druid. Period. That is the fundamental fact of who we are, and I don’t have any problem saying it loud and proud. In Oak: The Frame of Civilization, Mr. Logan goes through page after page of last names derived from it, of peoples who explicitly relied on it, on a common sense progression of civilization itself, from the branches of the oak based balanocultures, “among the most stable and affluent cultures the human world has ever known,” following the last ice age to the degenerate and unhealthy corn cultures of today. When he speaks of the oak tree, it isn’t just a symbol on a shield, although those are also mentioned, it is an arborist speaking about how profoundly the actual, physical oak tree has shaped mankind:
The Holocene is the age of oaks and humans. Never before had there been such a thing as memory or culture, or such a thing as a hearth, or such a thing as stock-raising or house-building or shipbuilding. Hominids had been around for at least two million years, but they became human beings as they began to learn to use oak.
Note, he does not say, as they began to appreciate the oak because they’re “nice”, or put pictures of it on dead and macerated sheets of itself, with ink made from its galls (I exaggerate – gall ink is much better for animal skin “paper” than for paper from trees, but you get the idea). Like I said in my very first post here, if you don’t have a physical oak tree you can go to and learn from, you will never be a druid. To take Mr. Logan’s point, you may not even be human.
Recently, I was involved in a teleconference for planning officials who manage oak woodland habitat, and while some presenters clearly were lobbying for their own special interests (mainly cattle ranching), a few very good questions were asked, which bear repeating. We all hear how valuable trees are, in the efforts to protect them from being cut down, and in efforts to have them planted. I’ve referred to many of those benefits myself, such as how having trees in your yard makes your home worth more money. The question that was raised, however, was whether or not what is perceived by the public as being viable oak woodland is actually sustainable (i.e. whether those oak woodlands with holes cut out for houses here and there are actually still living stands, or whether they are, at that point, so restricted that they are just waiting to die off). The consensus was that no, they are just waiting to die. They cannot generally seed themselves, shoots and sprouts are typically mowed down, the inclination is always towards cutting off this branch or that to make way for a power line or addition, and the habitat that an extant and viable woodland (500+ contiguous acres) provides is clearly lacking. The oak tree in the town square, while apparently sufficient to make people think they have not utterly desecrated Nature, is essentially a picture cut from a magazine and pasted on some adolescent’s bedroom wall. The town has cut it off from its natural and healthy world, and built up a monstrosity around it that it will wither and die within.
One would think that nobody would have to mention these things to a druidic audience, but apparently it is easier to think that because the oak is a symbol (and nothing else), and everything else is a symbol of something too, that symbol=symbol and everything is equal.
SHENANIGANS!
Not a sacred valley oak tree
There is research showing how spending three days in the forest results in over a month of increases in the cells that kill cancers. A prior study specifically contrasts that with going to the city. (Un)surprisingly, the city doesn’t make you healthier.
Today is Earth Day, a day where common people began to protest en masse the destruction that was being perpetrated upon themselves by pollution and corporate interests. It wasn’t actually about the planet as a being that was being killed – by and large, it was about parents not wanting their kids to have asthma because it was cheaper for some job-creator down the road to spew poisons over the town in an effort to make money for shareholders. Today, there is more propaganda coming out about how it’s a pagan holiday, and therefore evil and anti-American, than there is any effective protest or confrontation of the sources of our destruction. Today, people are singing kum-ba-yah (sorry, it’s actually This Land is Your Land) and thinking it will change something. Nice symbol, but it ain’t gonna change a goddamned thing. No doubt it will make people feel better though.
The problem is that while everybody is busy being peaceful and feeling better (but still worse than they would feel amongst the trees), the woodlands where our druid ancestors would have gone to, where the Californian natives were going to until the last century or so, are dying, and they are taking their spirits with them. Unless there is immediate and strong (possibly violent) action to end hominid cannibalism (remember, we’re all part of one entity), the dryads will go extinct, because those spirits of the oak, totem spirits of the druid, will be dead.
With all the books and blogs telling us what oak trees are, however, it may take some time to realize that.
The only source of failure on a journey will be the traveler’s own failure to follow the teachings of the Sacred Tree.
Furthermore, no trees get dead just because I have a hankering to learn about glassblowing or silver smelting or whatever else. A very cute and rather funny offering goes into that 
Beeswax candles are a 
