Axis Mundi

I remember last winter, December 21st, to be exact (shortest day of the year), I had been visiting my family for Christmas, actually spending it away from Renee (something I will not repeat). This had been an interesting time because it was the first time I had been home for any extended period of time since the death of my good friend Dave, who was from the same town. We may have even missed each other if things had been different and he had been in town, and neither of us may have made the effort to visit, being busy with family etc... the fact is that this was my first extended visit to the place where we grew up since he died.

It was also during this extended visit that I really started to notice the trees for the first time, not for some particular attachment or memory to Dave, for there is none that I can specifically think of. The first thing that drew me to the trees was an effort undertaken by the museum to draw people’s attention to them for the fact that they are all endangered in southwestern Ontario. The specific species all belong to the Carolinian zone, of which southwestern Ontario is the northern most reach. The more common trees in question are the deciduous walnut, maple, ash, elm, and sycamore. Some of the uncommon ones are the butternut, the tulip tree, the Ohio buckeye and the Kentucky coffee tree.

Paying attention to the trees is also an exercise in paying attention to their histories. I believe it is only appropriate that they become designate "heritage" beings; after all, the only other route the town could have followed is their ultimate extirpation. I recall visiting one of the trees, a giant Swamp White Oak, with my Father, who told me there had been an Oak that was equal to if not larger than the one we were looking at. A friend of his bought the land the tree was on, and apparently the tree was in the way of where his shed was supposed to be, so up came the tree for the shed.

There is a sense of being occupied by the oak we had looked at, the one I first approached on December 21st of last year. This tree has sidewalks built around it. I took a couple photographs of it, noting when I uploaded them that the houses behind it appeared much smaller than they were in person. I nearly fell off my seat when I observed this because in person, the houses seemed larger, human size. I think the houses are the appropriate size; it is the tree that is so larger than life that the houses are transformed into specs. Those houses are the living spaces of the people who occupy them, but the tree in their front yard is of a whole other order, it is that ancient axis mundi, the pole that connects the sky to the ground, everything else rotates around its presence. This may or may not be the Sequoia that John Muir climbed in Hetch Hetchy during a thunderstorm. It could also be the sacred Ash in Der Ring Des Nibelungen, or the Maypole in Britain, the Oak in Math the Son of Mathonwy or many others. It is curious that I first came upon the oak after attending Catholic Mass with my Grandparents. They proceeded to the rectory and I walked down the block to the tree. The church has its steeple, demanding the attention of people who drive by, while the oak waits a block away, for people who notice it.

The axis mundi for Christians is inside the steeple, down the aisle, in the center, above the tabernacle; it is the crucifix that the Christian world gravitates around. The maypole, the ash and many others have fulfilled similar roles in many other places, so it is fitting to see an oak as large and ancient as this one a block away. I would think that this is fluke if the sidewalks weren't built around it, or if it did not have the plaque on it, placed discreetly for anyone curious enough to seek it out. Though the town, like the majority of the western world has substituted oak, ash and crucifixes with the north and south poles, the secular axis by which the world rotates, the memory is there.

The memory of the place it had occupied, at least in southwestern Ontario, is as troubled as the current threats the Carolinians face. I find myself referring to a section in nearby Essex County's website, in which the full force of Cartesian dualism and the new inquisition of the environment was acted out as wide scale land rape. The historical section of the site (LINK)
offer us this historical piece of trivia:

Did You Know...

The Loyalists who moved here had to chop through one of the thickest walls of forest in North America to reach the soil. The settlers developed a hatred for trees and they "killed" these natural enemies by setting fire to them or by cutting a deep gash through the bark right around the tree to stop the tree from being nourished; the tree gradually died. For fifty years the pioneers of Essex County competed in a race to destroy the dense forest that kept them from the fertile soil. Fire became a symbol of material progress. Citizens of Chicago, 300 miles away, admired the glow in the sky on several occasions when millions of cords of Essex County hardwood (oak and walnut) went up in smoke as the settlers struggled to clear at least five acres as stipulated for their first year improvement, and then to enlarge their farms as each year went by.

The claim for space here is no different than the butternut hickory I previously wrote about. Here there is an erasure not only of space, not only of sentient thought as exhibited by the natural world, but also of the very fabric that informs (or weaves?) the world. The space that replaced it is one defined by what Locke refers to as the mixing of ones labour with the earth by a way of ensuring ones freedom. So, humans obtain freedom by razing the earth? This seems entirely contrary to what the oak and ash, as the axis mundi would dictate. So now, instead of an ancient being as the center of the world, we have places so remote from our every day lives as to be in the north and south poles. But, we now know that even these poles of the axis mundi are being burnt down! This is just as tragic as the removal of the original poles that the world spins around. I believe the effort for some time has been to replace that numinous center with ourselves, the entirely anthropocentric desire to be the only things that matter. But I still think that when Adam was given the charge of naming everything, it may not have necessarily been to claim them for his project of patriarchal dominion. I think the responsibility with such a task may have been to humbly acknowledge their own presence, even the presence of the Apple Tree, not as an act of aggression against, but as an acknowledgement that there are things outside the purview of understanding and domination. I'm sure some theologians would disagree, and could very well prove that wrong, but I can't help but think of what this cultural path, joined with the centralizing authority of Cartesianism has resulted in.

Is the acknowledgment of the Swamp White Oak's presence a block away from the church make me a pagan? Or is there room for dialogue among the many religious, secular and poetic lines about the presence this tree demands of willing and humble observers? St. Francis, for one, might agree, and I know of many others from other faiths and traditions that would agree with him. But if it does make me a pagan, I'd have to say the oak has a certain pull to it that calls the world to follow a different path.