In our planning we seldom ask, ‘how will this affect the earth?’ Or how will this new development impact other creatures? As was clear in the felling of a two hundred year old oak near a housing estate recently. The aggressive surgery suggested little awareness of the hundreds of insect species for whom this tree was home. Nor did any ritual mark the extraction of a sacred tree revered by our ancestors.
And will anyone remember the way stars seemed to get caught in its branches on a frosty night, or the moon play hide and seek in there? Or feel the absence of its giant shadow and its humbling presence?
From time to time trees need to be taken down but let it be done with some sense of this being a living body, a real presence. More and more we find ourselves living in an alien world where we are the aliens! It can even appear as if we have sold our birth-right of belonging to a communion of other lives for a virtual world of human imaging.
If you want to save your children’s most treasured gift, their sense of wonder, take them out to play or let them take you. Go out to meet all the creatures who have so much to tell us about who we are and how we can make this pilgrimage together as God’s one beautiful family – snowdrop, blackbird, frog and the oak gall wasp who inserts her eggs in an oak leaf.