trees – Feminism and Religion

Full Moon Reflection by Sara Wright

Moderator’s Note: This post was written in early February, 2026

The Big Bear Moon

(Ojibwe and other Northern Tribes)

We know that each full moon exerts a powerful pull on the earth. At the full moon, the Earth, Moon, and Sun align and the tidal bulges on both sides of the earth manifest as extremes (reminds us that extremes are part of all nature).

This full moon, called the Big Bear Moon also ushers in the First Turning of the year. Last night’s luminous round pearl reminds me that every full moon creates a magnetic and gravitational pull that effects every living being on this planet.

Dealing with these natural extremes on a personal level is necessary if sometimes unpleasant work. I have been a regular journal keeper for 50 plus years and notice that each full moon brings on physical symptoms that have increased in severity with age (inability to sleep/headache spikes/ irritability). When I was younger, I experienced the full moon’s pull as a potent ‘high’ that energized me too much. Another curious consistency is that for me the worst human betrayals including self – betrayal have occurred occur around or during the full moons. I have learned not to make personal decisions during this period and to watch out for weird highs/lows and for inexplicable/explosive anger.

Lately I also have been thinking about the forest whose individual trees synchronize to prepare for the magnetic/and gravitational pull of lunar and solar cycles/includes eclipses, etc. that literally suck up water drying trees out, so trees have learned to shut down to protect themselves from water loss. These extremes are particularly dangerous for young trees who have few if any water reserves, so old trees communicate to the seedlings/adolescents what to expect and what to do. Afterwards, trees separate again into individuals, but they also remain connected through their root systems and through the air so interspecies relationship within the forest does not cease. I wonder if during the winter months the trees are less likely to dry out during celestial events because so many are sleeping? Although most tree energy/power descends below to roots and the mycelial networks where life keeps humming, in colder climates natural antifreeze remains in tree trunks and expands during full moons. Sometimes the antifreeze isn’t enough to stop cracking which will damage the tree.

Plants as well as trees respond to the Moon’s gravitational and magnetic pull through leaf movements, altered stem/root growth, and by absorbing more water to compensate for shrinkage. I have noticed all these effects occurring in my houseplants during the months I spend more time inside with plants and the moon.

Winters go on forever and without my beloved bright green houseplants I would be bereft. I have been paying very close attention to my passionflowers this week during the waxing moon which is also occurring at the First Turning of the year.

One beauty needs repotting and until four days ago I planned to do this job in a couple of weeks. While immersed in another project I received an urgent message from that plant: repot me now. (root growth) Her voice was so insistent that I immediately dropped what I was doing to respond (all plants communicate with those who love them). As usual I expected an ordeal for both of us, so I was stunned to see how easily the plant separated from her pot. Although her thick white roots were spiraling out of the bottom, the whole plant let go without my help (this has never happened to me before – usually re-potting is traumatic with the plant giving off a scent that I associate with pain because plants make sounds or scents when hurt) Ah, she knew when the timing was just right and I (thankfully) was listening! Another point worth mentioning is that repotting/cutting creates distress for all plants. This repotted passionflower had no reaction at all and is already showing new stem growth.

I have also been watching my two other passionflowers. The two in the south windows have required daily watering One is a cutting I placed in a dove pot early last summer that has vined herself around the whole southern window and is now attaching tendrils to the ceiling and a piece of string that I attached to the plant to give the tendrils purchase if/ as the vine moves across the room. Instead of turning south the top of this vine seems to be traveling northeast– or was (it might be important to add that I also had a dream that my dog Coalie and I were traveling northeast via the coast earlier this month). In the last two days the tendrils have reversed their trajectory and are climbing back over themselves towards the west! It’s winter, and southern sun is normally what these plants love.

The Big Bear moon was full last night and this morning the passionflower is once again traveling northeast! So, this reversal was temporary, but it demonstrates the powers of the moon (and other celestial bodies) to create effects like reversals on earth, humans included. Intriguing to say the least.

The third passionflower is in a window that faces north/ northeast. I planted cuttings for someone whose brutal betrayal last spring on the full moon and good friday*(2) unhinged me. After crucifixion day this passionflower immediately developed a mass of blooms, eight weeks before the onset of her regular blossoming cycle. A crown of thorns greeted me each day.

The trauma was so severe that I lost two months of my life. When each astonishing blossom scented the air I felt the knife twist like a corkscrew deepening the hole in my gut. After two plus months nature intervened and I was free at last.

But it took months before I was able to separate that one passionflower from the Betrayer. My passionflowers lived outdoors for the summer which allowed me some space. I started new plants. Both prospered under my care. When I was able, I asked the original plant for forgiveness, but it was too late. My lack of love and attention resulted in a passionflower that was no longer thriving.

Today I remain the ‘Old Woman’ in the crucifier’s life. What I will never forget is that he scapegoated me without cause; I do not hate him but I do not wish him well. That crown of thorns is on his head, not mine.

Lately, I have been asking the passionflower that produced vines and flowers for a killer of soul what to do. Yesterday I received a nudge. Take three cuttings and let me go.

Begin again.

The words could have come from a fairy tale.

I followed the first directions. Next, I burned both my homemade solstice balsam wreaths to acknowledge the circle that had been broken.

I am hedging around throwing out the old plant – part of me wonders if I need to wait until she speaks again – or maybe I am just not ready. Plants are wonderfully patient with humans who often need many more than one set of instructions.

This morning the three cuttings are waving their tendrils towards the light – (normally they droop for days). The repotted plant looks as if ki has been in her new home for a while. No indication that she has just been repotted!

Plants are Powerful Teachers and I am in perpetual awe of how little I know, how mysterious the ways of nature remain. But in this process of writing about plants, I have also uncovered my most recent intentions. Nature, no doubt has known all along!!

Postscript: February 5 9AM – this morning I was stunned to see a bud emerge from a new plant just repotted…. this too has never happened before (this plant has not lived long enough to adjust her cycle for blooming to the light the plant receives in the house). How important it is to learn how to observe and to listen!

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(1) February 2nd is when the bear first leaves his den to determine how much longer winter will last – if he doesn’t see the sun, he knows that winter will last much longer. When the colonists arrived, they turned the Indigenous bear story into a groundhog story)

(2) (AI) The passionflower is steeped in16th-century Christian mythology, where Spanish missionaries interpreted its unique structure as symbols of the Passion of Christ. The corona filaments represented the Crown of Thorns, while the three stigmas symbolized the nails, and the five anthers were wounds.

My commentary:.

In pre – christian/christian mythology one sees Osiris, Dionysus, and Jesus all wearing crowns of one sort or another. Both sides of the archetype can be lived out depending upon whichever side of the alignment a person is living through. For example, in myth Dionysus wore a crown to celebrate joy; Jesus wore a crown to die. Osiris wore a crown depicting his rule over the Underworld.

For Indigenous peoples of South America the passionflower is called the Vine of Souls.

Born Again by Sara Wright

“Let me sing to you about how people turn into other things.” (Ovid)

Years ago I placed my brother’s ashes in a shallow depression that I had dug near a granite fern and moss covered boulder. The brook flowed just a few feet away and at the last minute I scattered a few filaments over the shallow waters, returning them to the sea. A week later I planted a hazel nut tree nearby. A fossilized spiral ammonite marks my brother’s grave.

Thanks to the underground highway created out of millions of tree/plant roots, the extensive net of fungal hyphae and this communal system’s miraculous ability to exchange nutrients/minerals/sugar, my brother lives on as part of this forest…The gracefully spreading hazel and all the other trees (spruce, maple, balsam, hemlock, ash) that are scattered around this hallowed woodland grove have been nourished by the bones of one I loved.

Yet only recently have I been possessed by revelation.

Reflections in a Winter Forest by Sara Wright

Yesterday’s welcome sun and warm temperatures had me out the door to lay down another round of ashes before the next storm. After packing down our woodland paths with snowshoes we were off to our favorite forest. I had planned to look for liverworts but as usual nature had other plans nudging me to note which trees might be photosynthesizing around these forest edges. At any given moment there are thousands of interactions between tree bark and ki’s environment that most of us take for granted. If you pay attention to bark you may, like me, develop a deep respect for the unparalleled beauty and for the protective skin of every tree. Especially during the winter months.

We know that bark protects the tree from insects and other damage, and the thick ridged bark of older pines or hemlocks also holds moisture in ki’s fissures as well as providing creaturely homes.

I feel compelled to stop to run my hands over these thick white pine trunks in gratitude and awe for their existence. I do the same thing at home in my modest sanctuary, but here the pines are older like the ones that once entirely covered the mountain behind me, all the way to the ledges…I remind myself that the waxy needles on conifers also photosynthesize on warm sunny days.

The Music of Creation by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

I am excited to announce my latest book: The Music of Creation: Exploring Verse and Vibration in the Bible. In this book I present pagan translations of the Bible and then lay out spiritual practices based on those verses. The practices make use of “the triple secret” of manifestation which is Mudra (body or hand position), Mantra (chant) and Mandala (image). Each has power on their own. Together they become even more compelling. Below are two excerpts from the book. The first is a template of chanting and the power it can have in our bodies and in our lives.

Excerpt 1 – Below, I note four different ways to approach chanting. All have merit. They can be combined. In each, I use Hallelujah (in its meaning of praise) as an example.

First: Song, performance, vibration. Hallelujah has been a particular focus of song-writing with beautiful results. The top results which come to my mind are Leonard Cohen and Handel. Hallelujah is a wonderful example of a performance chant and a choral piece.

The Littlest Balsam by Sara Wright

Five years ago
I dug a seedling
in protest
ki’s deep green
needles
slender trunk
and roots
yielded
to sweet
spring earth
with prayers.

I believed.

One winter night
I will celebrate
your life
the lives of
thousands
with a
candlelit
spiral
of tiny white lights.

Tonight
white flames
adorn you
old longings
and heartbreak
we share the same
root
stilled by
simple beauty
a single
reflection
of Love.

From the Archives: Tree of Life: The Festival of the Trees in an Age of Treefall by Jill Hammer

This was originally posted on January 22, 2019

Almost every day, I walk in Central Park. There are certain trees there I’ve come to know: the gnarled cherry trees by the reservoir, the bending willows and tall bald cypress by the pond, the sycamores that drop their bark each summer, the hawthorn not far from Central Park West. Lately I’ve been taking photos of the trees to try to capture their essence, their posture in the world. The trees around me feel like friends, which is what an ancient midrash (interpretation/legend) called Genesis Rabbah says about trees: that they are friends to humankind. To me, they’ve always been a central manifestation of Mother Earth.

Currently, the national parks in the United States have no staff because of the government shutdown. Some people have taken the opportunity to cut down the rare and endangered Joshua trees in the Joshua Tree National Park—just for fun, I guess, or as a trophy of some kind. Meanwhile, President Bolsonaro of Brazil recently has indicted that he wants to remove protection for the rainforest, in order to allow development. It appears that my friends the trees have enemies. Sometimes the enmity is for personal/corporate gain, and sometimes the enmity seems to have no reason at all.

Big Mama by Arianne MacBean

I used to tell my dance students that the dance floor was like a Big Mama, aways there to catch them, always there to sink into, always there to press back. This was my way of teaching them to trust the floor, that it was not a place where they needed to fear crashing into, but a place that wanted to take them in, hug them, love them. As dancers, we spend much time focused on the floor, how to release into it with control, how to push off it, even how to defy it and manipulate it. It becomes our partner in all dances, this blanket beneath us. But I haven’t been in a dance studio for a few years and so I have found myself looking up, instead of down.

The Tree in my Front Yard by Marie Cartier

I have not been in this room for three years- except to run in and out -the pandemic made me claustrophobic and anyway I usually need a coffee shop environment to write and we were in lock down so my wife and I transformed our living room to a coffeeshop, Fig and Hillary’s- so named for the huge Hillary poster on the wall and the fig trees in the backyard. My office became a storage room piled high with—what? Stuff.

Then, finally… it seemed the pandemic –at least in terms of dire death prediction—was perhaps over. It took most of this post pandemic year to get up out of the living room where I had encamped to come back to here—my actual office. To put the bookshelves back and—to turn my desk around so I am not facing the door but facing the window.

Floods and Flexibility: Another Rainy Day Reflection by Sara Wright

As soon as I awakened, I set off for my predawn walk in light rain, a habit that I am re -forming after having lived in NM that one summer when the days were too hot, too windy, the air too polluted for me to stand being outdoors except in the predawn hours. It was even too damn hot to sleep at night…even my beloved wild lizards hid out during the fierce heat of the day.

I am adjusting to living in the tropics by becoming more and more flexible. I make no plans. I stay home when I need to, allowing the day to guide me. I will not walk in polluted air even at 4:30 AM. Fortunately, I love my simple cabin that is mercifully empty of ‘stuff’. I have evolved into a minimalist. Except for plants, dogs, and Lily b my bird, my closest friends and relatives not much has change here since I built this house except that I have less!

Aging and the Ancestral Dark? by Sara Wright

Unfortunately, an inner darkness has been with me all fall hiding in the corners of my mind and disturbing my body creating headaches and stomach troubles during the day. Although I attempt to protect myself from a culture that I cannot control by not listening to news, watching television, movies or perusing social media I am painfully aware of the fact that politicians on an international level cannot even agree to discuss what to do about climate change – this after 30 years of doing absolutely nothing – creating in me a mindless fury that leaves me in black despair. The time of acting locally and thinking globally is long past. Thinking and doing must occur on a global level. Novelist Richard Powers states the obvious: “People can better imagine the end of the end of the world before the end of Capitalism”. Then we can move to the moon.

I have also been forced to acknowledge how difficult this year has been on a personal level. Aging is affecting my energy level, increasing the severity of depressed states, my sense of inner and outer balance. I am vulnerable and know it although I do my best to begin each day with gratitude as I first peer out at my beloved trees, a little nuthatch or chickadee, gaze at a silver crescent, or celebrate a pale pink dawning.