how sacred spaces become sacred spaces

a walk among the Mahatmas at Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest

One hundred and six years ago today, on July 30, 1918, a thirty-one-year-old U.S. soldier named Alfred Joyce Kilmer died in a forest in France. Kilmer was a poet, best known for his poem “Trees,” which I will share at the end of this post. He wrote for the New York Times Review of Books and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He was also a husband and father. But in April 1917, seventeen days after the U.S. entered World War, he enlisted as a soldier.

Eighty-eight years ago today, on July 30, 1936, eighteen years to the day after Kilmer’s death, the U.S. Forest Service dedicated a 3840-acre tract in the Little Santeetlah Forest, in western North Carolina, to his memory. It was (and still is) the largest tract of old growth forest east of the Mississippi, and the federal government purchased it just days before loggers were to begin cutting. It almost didn’t make it.

Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is a two-and-a-half-hour drive from our home in Asheville. Jeanine and I visited there shortly after we moved here in 1996 and had not been back since. But I’m in the middle of re-reading a novel about trees and people who love them--Richard Powers’ The Overstory--and reading that book again lit my desire for another pilgrimage to Joyce Kilmer. Jeanine said she wanted to go, too, and on Saturday we went.

The woods at Joyce Kilmer are home to oak, basswood, beech, and sycamore, but the stars of the show are the tulip poplars, several of whom are a hundred feet tall, twenty feet or more in circumference, and over four hundred years old. That’s no match for the sequoias and redwoods of the west coast—many of them are over two thousand years old and three times as tall--but here in the east, once the chestnuts died by blight in the early 1900’s, poplars are as ancient and large as trees come.

Jeanine and I were the first car in the parking lot. We crossed the creek and headed uphill. It’s a short trail, a two-mile loop, and the incline is modest. We walked slowly and stopped frequently. We had talked non-stop on the drive over—about our kids, our parents, our work, our country—but in the woods we spoke very little, and then only of the trees.

I’ve heard Richard Powers say in interviews that when you walk from a section of forest that has been previously logged, one where the trees might be sixty or a hundred years old, and into a section that’s never been logged, where the trees are three- and four-hundred years old, no one has to tell you that you’ve entered an old growth forest. You just feel it. And that was true for us. We felt it.

What we were feeling, and what you’d feel too if you were there, is impossible to say with certainty, but I think it’s partly the trees themselves. There’s a character in The Overstory who says that trees are “the most wondrous products of four billion years of life.” That’s a strong statement, and I’ll go a shade stronger: trees are the most virtuous products of four billion years of life. And they have a presence.

Like everything else that lives, of course, trees seek their own survival. They want to continue living and to create offspring that live. But their survival-seeking never moves them to act against the good of the habitat in which they live. You may have read Peter Wohlleben’s beautiful book The Hidden Life of Trees, a book that describes the ways trees communicate, collaborate, and share resources not just with their own kind—oaks with oaks, poplars with poplars—but with all the other trees around, with the fungi at their roots, and with the birds and squirrels in their branches. They have boundaries—that’s what bark is—but a mature tree shares a third or more of the food it generates with other creatures. When trees know they’re dying, they send the life-sustaining chemicals of their leaves, branches, and trunks down to their roots, where the fungal network receives it, takes some for itself, and passes it on to the roots of other trees. And when the tree completes its dying and falls to the earth, its now-horizontal body offers habitat and nourishment for fungi, mosses, lichens, birds, mammals, reptiles, and other creatures. “In life, in death, in life beyond death,” as the creeds of Christianity put it, trees give their lives away to others. How poetically right, then, and in my theology, how alchemically right, that Jesus gave his life away on a tree.

So, part of what we feel in an old growth forest, I suspect, is the presence, wisdom, and virtue of these Mahatmas (Mahatma means “great soul”) who live not just for their own good but for the good of others. But the other thing we feel, I think, is the accumulated reverence of all the other creatures who inhabit the forest. I’m thinking here of the long-term inhabitants: the younger trees honoring their larger, wiser elders, the mosses giving thanks for a dwelling place in the shade, the birds singing of their nesting place, the squirrels screeching praise for another acorn. And of short-term inhabitants, day-trippers like Jeanine and me. All creatures, in our own ways, feel awe in the presence of beings that have been alive centuries longer than we have. And when awe, reverence, and love happen over and over in a place, year after year, they develop a kind of staying power. Every reverent pilgrim leaves behind a residual trace of their reverence, and when we enter the spaces they have helped consecrate, we enter an aura of sacredness that no one needs to tell us we’ve entered. We just feel it..  

I came to this thought, that part of what we feel in an old growth forest is the accumulated reverence of those who have been there before us, when Jeanine and I came to this pair of poplars near the top of the trail.

I have no way of knowing, but I imagine these two are the most photographed trees in the forest. They sit in a small clearing at the top of the upper loop, just as the trail turns and begins to descend. If the trail were a labyrinth, these two would be at the center. Or if these woods are a cathedral, holy in its entirety, this place is the extra-holy altar.

I felt something energetically different here, and I paused to sense into it.  A feeling was trying to land in me that needed me to be still and give it time to happen.

I could tell it was a feeling I’d felt before, but I couldn’t remember when or where. And then a memory landed, of sitting in the cave on Mount Arunachala, in the Indian city of Tiruvannamalai, where the Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi lived for over twenty years. He spent those years almost entirely in silence. Sometimes people would climb the mountain to sit in the cave with him. Sometimes they’d write him questions. Sometimes he’d write back responses. But mostly he just sat alone and meditated. In 1922, at the age of 42, he left the cave, walked to the bottom of the mountain, and began sitting there. A devotee built him a hut, then another, and one building at a time an ashram grew up around him. Maharshi died in 1950, but the ashram, Sri Ramanasramam, remains a place of worship and teaching visited by people from all over the world.

I spent four days there in 2019, with a group of pilgrims from the U.S. and Canada. One morning I walked the path up the mountain to the cave where Maharshi had lived and where he and others have been meditating for centuries.

What I was feeling now, before these poplars in Appalachia, was like what I had felt then, in the cave on Arunachala.

And then another feeling-memory landed, from the same pilgrimage to India, of being in the adoration chapel at the Saint Thomas Cathedral in Chennai. The adoration chapel adjoins the main church, and in it, behind a glass, is bread that has been blessed and consecrated as the sacramental body of Christ. People sit in pews before the sacrament and, as the name of the chapel suggests, adore it. When I walked into that chapel, I felt an energetic force unlike any I had ever felt before or any I have felt since. I sat there for half an hour—enjoying that energy, definitely; adding to it, hopefully. I would have sat longer had the group I was with not been boarding a bus to leave.

This memory, too, helped me understand what I was feeling in the presence of these poplars: the living energy of a great being, a Mahatma, a Maharshi, a Christ, and the also-living energy of those who have stood or sat or knelt or fallen prostrate before that great being.

There’s a directive given to people who visit forests and other wild places: “Leave no trace.” The idea is not to leave trash and other waste behind and to stay on trails as much as possible so as not to disrupt the delicate eco-systems of the place.

But spiritually, I believe, there’s no such thing as “leave no trace.” We and every being of the earth are always leaving a trace. Traces of reverence, humility, love, and other virtues, or traces of blindness, arrogance, indifference, and other poisons. And those who come after us, for better or worse, will feel the consecrating or desecrating residue of what we leave behind.

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Here’s a trace of Joyce Kilmer, his poem “Trees”:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

And a trace of Richard Powers, narrating the experience of a character in The Overstory who comes for the first time to the western Cascades, in Washington state, and feels awestruck by the hemlock, grand fir, yellow cedar, Douglas-fir, and Sitka spruce around her:

She addresses the cedar, using words of the forest’s first humans. “Long Life Maker. I’m here. Down here.” She feels foolish, at first. But each word is a little easier than the next.

“Thank you for the baskets and the boxes. Thank you for the capes and hats and skirts. Thank you for the cradles. The beds. The diapers. Canoes. Paddles, harpoons, and nets. Poles, logs, posts. The rot-proof shakes and shingles. The kindling that will always light.”

Each new item is release and relief. Finding no good reason to quit now, she lets the gratitude spill out. “Thank you for the tools. The chests. The decking. The clothes closets. The paneling. I forget. . . . Thank you,” she says, following the ancient formula. “For all these gifts that you have given.” And still not knowing how to stop, she adds, “We’re sorry. We didn’t know how hard it is for you to grow back” (p. 135).