Our home attracted death like a magnet. When I was five years-old my 42-year-old father took an overdose of sleeping pills and was committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, north of Los Angeles. He was a writer who became increasingly angry and depressed when he couldn’t make a living to support his family. In a journal I found years later, the final entry read:
“November 8th:
A hundred failures, an endless number of failures, until now, my confidence, my hope, my belief in myself, has run completely out. Middle aged, I stand and gaze ahead, numb, confused, and desperately worried. All around me I see the young in spirit, the young in heart, with ten times my confidence, twice my youth, ten times my fervor, twice my education.
I see them all, a whole army of them, battering at the same doors I’m battering, trying in the same field I’m trying. Yes, on a Sunday morning in early November, my hope and my life stream are both running desperately low, so low, so stagnant, that I hold my breath in fear, believing that the dark, blank curtain is about to descend.”
He survived, but our lives were never the same. Earlier that year, a close friend of the family shot himself. I remember going to the service, confused and afraid, but no one talked about why he died, but everyone knew it was suicide. Later that year my closest friend, Woody, drowned in the river near our house. My mother was so glad I was alive, she couldn’t listen to my own grief or feelings of loss.
My mother was pre-occupied with death. She was afraid she would die before I graduated high school and paid for a life insurance policy she couldn’t afford so I’d have some money when she was gone. She also bought an insurance policy for me. “You should always be prepared to support your family, even when you’re gone,” she told me. I hadn’t yet turned six.
Trees saved my life.
Being at home, literally felt like a death sentence. By the time I was six, I would leave the house whenever I could and climb the tallest tree in the neighborhood. I felt most alive when I was in a tree. I would climb to the very top and feel at one with the tree as I’d sway back and forth in the wind.
I felt disconnected from the human community, but aligned with the trees. When I struggled with depression later in life, I resonated with these words written by playwright Eugene O’Neill in autobiographical play, A Long Day’s Journey into Night:
“It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, and who must always be a little in love with death.”
I felt most myself when I was high in the trees. I thought, “Trees never judge themselves. They never say, ‘I’m too short or too fat.’ Trees stand tall no matter what the weather.” But trees are endangered these days.
When I first met Jack Gescheidt, founder of The TreeSpirit Project, I knew I had found a kindred spirit. I learned he had helped save the giant redwood trees in Richardson Grove and I helped bring him to our small town of Willits to help save the trees in our valley. He’s one of the true heroes in the world. He cares about trees and he cares about people who care about the trees.
He’s recently decided to create a book of his “TreeSpirit” photographs and experiences. As a fellow writer, I know all too well the challenges of getting a book published and the compromises we are asked to make. I had a contract signed with a large publisher for one of my books. It would be my entre into big time publishing. They had only one request: they wanted me to remove the section I had written on male circumcision and my statement that “male circumcision was a form of child sexual abuse.” I refused, and ended up publishing the book myself.
Jack is facing a similar challenge. “This book began,” he says, “when a New York City publisher called and generously offered to make it, complete with cash advance. But our discussions revealed our vision for the book was not aligned, neither its size, its potential, or its purpose. Crucially, we couldn’t agree that the photographs — of nude, vulnerable people among trees — should not, MUST not, be printed on anything but 100% recycled or tree-free paper.
Not one to hold my tongue when my strongest beliefs are questioned, I quoted one my favorite poems, by Kahlil Gibran:
‘Trees are poems Earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.’
But that was in Gibran’s day years ago; today we can make books, as my book will be made, without harming trees.”
“I made more than 120 photographs, over 12 years, with volunteers, not paid models,” Jack continues. “They were all willing to be naked and vulnerable to bring attention to the beauty and necessity of the trees around us that enrich our daily lives. Trees and forests also sequester carbon in our era of human-caused climate change. They do this efficiently, silently, constantly, and for free.
The Project’s photographs were made possible by a community of fellow tree and nature lovers. Now I’m again asking for community support from environmentalists, naturalists, writers, and other cultural creatives everywhere who enjoy these images, and the book’s purpose. That’s the same as TreeSpirit’s mission: to raise awareness of the critical role of trees in our lives, both globally and personally.
From its beginning, ‘TreeSpirit’ was my way of needing to do something with the strong feelings I have around trees. My earliest childhood memories are of being outdoors near trees in upstate New York, running — toddling! — around. Decades later, as a 42-year-old man living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, I had a crisis in my life — another love relationship that ended with my heart being broken — and again trees were there to comfort me.
The giant oak tree in this self-portrait, pictured at the beginning of the article, was made with the “Grandmother Tree,” as I call her, in Marin County, California. She was the old soul that first brought me to tears and inspired me to make the first photos with people in them. I wanted to show her size in relationship to me, add drama and also, crucially, tenderness. I’ve had a lifelong love affair with trees, but growing up in New York, I learned it was safer to hide this degree of vulnerability. It took me until I was in my forties to have the courage to show it.”
Jack’s Kickstarter campaign for his book, “We Are Trees,” is here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/treespiritproject/treespirit-project-coffee-table-book?ref=2hhjyp
We’re running out of time to save the world’s forests, and no time to lose in sharing the message and images of this timely book: the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign running now lasts just 30 days. If you also care about trees and the natural world, will you help this “Jack of all Trees” publish his “We Are Trees,” the honorable way?
