The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way…As a man is, so he sees.[1]

William Blake

Perhaps you have noticed that even in the very lightest breeze you can hear the voice of the cottonwood tree; this we understand as prayer to the Great Spirit; for not only men, but all things and all beings pray to Him continually in differing ways.[2]

Black Elk

The northbound turnoff leads to the ghost highway of old 395, leading to the village of Olancha. A newly divided highway diverts traffic westward toward the Sierra Nevada mountains. As I cruise the old highway, a creepy feeling pricks the back of my neck. For decades, hundreds of 18-wheeler freighters and speeding passenger cars hell-bent for skiing at Mammoth Mountain whizzed by on this road. Today I could stand in the middle of the old highway and not see another car for an hour. Silence. A cold December wind blows off Owens Lake as a scrawny, grey coyote scurries to the middle of the road. I stopped the car, and we have a staring contest.

Driving slowly, I pass a straight line of old cottonwood trees. Back in the 1870s, a rancher used cut cottonwood branches to fence his land. Because of the high-water table, the fence took root, and cottonwood trees were resurrected from the old branches in situ.

I have been enchanted with these trees for years. They are the tallest trees in the Owens Valley, providing welcoming shade in the heat of summer. I know what it is: it is the sound of the rustling leaves that captivates me. I feel a deep communion with these trees, the Freemont Cottonwood. My favorite place for a rest stop is just ahead. A grove of cottonwoods shelters the Ranch House Café from ruthless winds that have been known to blow 18-wheelers off the highway.

As I arrive at the Ranch House Café, there are more goose bumps and bristling neck hairs. The café is closed and boarded up. Huge tumble weeds block the front door. Broken cottonwood branches crushed the rose garden. Another haunting scene. Not long ago, this was a highway oasis after a long drive. In the winter, skiers heading to Mammoth Mountain lined up outside the front door. My favorite table at a corner window gave me a view of thrashing winter storms outside, or cowboys loading Angus cattle up the ramp across the street, and the smell of the barbecue smoker preparing ribs and brisket for summer visitors.

A grove of cottonwood trees is still there next to the café. I always stop here to pray with the trees. The oldest of the trees, Grandfather, has fallen. Burn scars hint at a recent lightning strike.

The ground is covered with broken branches and twigs. I pick up a dried cottonwood branch, rub my hand over the bark, finding bud scale scars, and lumpy knuckles, where leaves had once grown. With a cracking snap, I break the branch at that point. At the center of the opened branch is a rose-shaped, five-pointed star. This was the inner pith of the plant, transporting nutrients to emerging leaf buds. There is sacred symbolism here in my hand.
[3]

Nature writer Deb Mowry shares this:

“Dakota Native Americans tell a story of a little star who wanted to hear the sounds and songs of humans and hid in the cottonwood so as not to disturb the people as they worked. Cheyenne and Arapahoe also noticed the star. In their tradition, if the Spirit-Of-The-Night-Sky needs more stars, it calls upon the Wind Spirit, who blows and causes cottonwood twigs to break, releasing their stars to heaven.”
[4]

The students in my world religions class at Saddleback Community College in Mission Viejo, California, would have recognized this reflection as expressing “animism.” We studied together Native American and African tribal religions, once labeled as “primitive” religions by E. B. Taylor in his book Primitive Culture. Tylor contended that the beginnings of religion saw spirit presence in animals, plants, wells, rivers, and other landscape features.

Mary Frohlick, in her book, The Heart of the Heart of the World, reveals that this mindset is a problem. It looks upon indigenous spiritualities as primitive and immature. It looks upon the primal religions with eyes of Western dualism: spirit versus matter. This viewpoint focuses on belief, which is a “fixed statement of cognitive truth.”
[5]

Frohlich reports that current anthropology offers a postmodern reframing of animism as a “new animism.” This new animism is expressed in a thorough, fieldwork-based re-evaluation of indigenous spiritualities in order to understand better the vast diversity of ways in which their participants experientially engage in living.

Frohlich writes, “Indigenous communities whose survival depends on intimate daily participation in their local ecosystem develop ritualized customs of communication with the creatures and landscape features with which they are interdependent. This communication presumes a certain mutuality between human and other living and non-living beings.”[6]

Within this new animism, there is no longer a hierarchy of creatures in which humans are superior and dominant. Key words are kinship and interdependency. All creatures depend on their survival through a multitude of relationships with other creatures.

You can see that this is a shift from our mindset regarding created things as separate from us and beginning to see dynamic interconnections between us and the rest of the created world.

As a Religious Sister of the Sacred Heart (RSCL), Mary Frohlich draws us deeper into the spiritual heart of creation. She reinterprets the traditional Roman Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus by seeing it as a dynamic symbol that pulses at the very center of creation. She invites us to perceive the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the essential life-force that unites all beings, a heartbeat that resonates with every element of the earth and every creature within it.

There was a time when people experienced spiritual encounters in nature. Our modern minds have been trained to objectify the world as mechanical. We look on the natural world as an entity to itself, a milieu to be studied and observed, and push the mystical to the side.

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor writes: “Each of us has a ‘buffered self’ trapped within our own minds and subjectivity, cut off from anything divine or transcendent. We long for transcendence, something that is beyond us. Enchantment is not hard to find; it is all around us.”[7]

I have been dissecting this dead cottonwood tree. There are scientific labels that specify a place within the Linnean botanical map. “Populus fremontii (Fremont’s cottonwood) is a large tree growing 39-115 feet in height with a wide crown, with a trunk up to four feet in diameter. The bark is smooth when young; becoming deeply fissured with whitish, cracked bark on old trees. The 1.2-2.8-inch-long leaves are cordate (heart-shaped) with an elongated tip, with white veins and coarse crenate teeth along the sides, glabrous to hairy, and often stained with milky resin. Autumn colors occur from October-November, mainly a bright yellow, also orange, rarely red.”[8]

I imagine the Hasidic Jewish mystic Martin Buber sitting next to me on this “dead” cottonwood tree. His book, I and Thou (Ich und Dich) describes his mystical encounter with a tree.

“I consider a tree. I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background. I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, such of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air—and the obscure growth itself.”[9]

With my intense observations of the tree and the rose-shaped, five-pointed star within, this tree remains an object, an It.

Buber continues:

“It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It.”[10]

Buber contemplates this tree, fully present to him here and now. The separation between “It/that tree” and “Buber on the tree trunk” dissolves and for a brief moment they merge into One, in a place that is love—God’s place for you and me.

Buber is looking at you and me as he sits on this old tree, saying there are two ways to look at our existence: there is the I who looks creation and other persons as separate from us, and there is the I that looks at creation and other persons as Thou. This is a mystical connection without boundaries. Buber is helping us see that our life finds meaning in relationships. As we awaken to this I-and-thou connection with all creation, we are brought into deeper relationship with God.

A large crack, as the earth trembles. I fall backward off the tree. As I rise up to see what happened, a seismic break has separated the tree trunk, revealing a gaping wound, a rotting corpse, upon which thousands of brown beetles are feeding. Dust to dust, bark to bark, the giant tree slowly will turn into a pile of sawdust.

Spiritual writer Belden Lane shares a vision of the emerging future:

“Our entire culture is on the edge now of a huge leap in consciousness, leading us from a classical model of perceiving each other as strictly separate beings (subject and object, huma and tree) to a quantum model of knowing ourselves capable of being simultaneously subject and object, tree, and human. Inextricably bound in community.”[11]

As I step away from the dead cottonwood tree, this Grandfather tree, I notice several young, green cottonwood sprouts emerging from the roots of the tree. The rich humus of earth and the high water table will feed their growth. In a few years, the Ranch House Café will collapse. Scavengers will remove wood and other debris. This sacred grove of cottonwoods will continue into another century, resurrecting this place of prayer.

Resources:

Blake, William. Letters of William Blake. London, UK: Methuen and Company, 1907. P. 62.

Lane, Belden. “Trees and the Life of Prayer,” Spiritus 25 (2025):66.

Buber, Martin. I and Thou.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self.

Frohlich, Mary. The Heart at the Heart of the World. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2024.

Mowry, Deb. The Importance of a Cottonwood Twig. Field Notes. Montana Public Radio. Broadcast 2.23 and 2.26.2022

Black Elk, Sacred Pipe, 75

Mangus, Serena. The Cottonwood Tree. Thomaston, Maine: Tilbury House Publishers

Cain, Kathleen. The Cottonwood Tree: An American Champion. Boulder, CO, 2007: Johnson Books.

[1] Blake, William. The Letters of William Blake, 62.

[2] Black Elk, Sacred Pipe, 75.

[3] Mowry, Deb. The Importance of a Cottonwood Twig. Field Notes. Montana Public Radio. Broadcast 2.23 and 2.26.2022

[4] Mowry, Ibid.

[5] Frohlich, Mary. The Heart of the Heart of the World. 54-55.

[6] Frohlich, Ibid.

[7] Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self.

[8] Wikipedia

[9] Buber, I and Thou, 14.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Lane, Belden, “Trees and the Life of Prayer,” Spiritus 25 (2025):66,