A Cathedral of Trees

In the State of Maine, I am now a Notary Public and authorized to wed beloveds.  Notaries are also authorized in Florida and South Carolina, and the latter caught my eye, for an anecdote once I heard.

A man from the low country told me that in South Carolina, when two beloveds stand beneath a Live Oak tree and give voice to their shared love, then that tree is their witness.  They are legally wed.

I cannot vouch that law stands, but I can vouch that Quercus virginiana – the southern Live Oak, known to live more than 1,000 years, with a trunk circumference of 40 feet or more, and a crown spread of 90 feet or more – has a powerful draw to couples seeking to give voice to their vows.

The fact is, our blog of June 16, 2011 “Thomas Berry and the Tree of Life” wrote about marriage beneath the live oak tree – that would be my elopement with Becca in August 2004 – and that blog has received the highest number of hits on our Art Farm.  Couples have pulled quotations from our text and shown links to our ceremony under the Tree of Life, in Audubon Park in New Orleans. Couples are drawn to that spot, and our experience stands as a marker now along their path.

To be sure, the draw is that tree, more than my prose, and that power is undeniable.  To the ancient Greeks, the oak tree was the domain of Zeus, a lightning god and their principal deity.  Its rustling leaves, the voice of Zeus.

But more than just elemental power, the oak provides habitat for hundreds of insects and invertebrates, not to mention birds and animals.  It is no wonder that the Gauls and Romans associated the tree with the god of agriculture and healing.  Healing, perhaps, drew me to the tree.

In Northern New England, Pine trees abound and in Breton legend, that was the tree Merlin climbed, had a revelation and never returned to mortal life; in this sacred tree the soul of Merlin awaits his return.  A tree of vitality and continuity, the Pine symbolizes the life force, death and resurrection.

Maine is the Pine Tree state.  In colonial days, all Pine trees of a certain girth belonged, by fiat, to the King of England, as masts for the ships of His Majesty’s Navy.  But before the English arrived the Indigenous Americans were calling trees, all trees, “our standing brothers,” the quiet center of being.

And if you look around you start to notice that in the ancient wisdom trees were at the center of many traditions: the Tree of Life; the Tree of Knowledge; the “Assembly Tree of the Gods”; the axis mundi of the cosmos; in pre-hieroglyphic script of Egypt, the word for “giving birth” is derived directly from the word for tree.  The Tree it seems is the great mother of creation.

They are the yeomen of the oxygen factory but photosynthesis is only one small aspect of their abundance.  They gift to us food, clothing and shelter and have informed the architecture of our great spaces.  Both Egyptian and Greek temples had columns originally made of trees, later stylized in stone, and from those buildings columns came to adorn places of worship, including banks and government buildings.

It has been argued that the arches and vaults of Gothic cathedrals represent the interlacing branches of trees; the path down the nave becoming a symbolic path among “our standing brothers.”  Chartres Cathedral, it has been claimed, was built upon the site of a grove sacred to the Druids.

It is hard to fathom how vast the symbolism may be, and yet easy to understand why lovers are ever drawn, nestled safely among the trees, to give voice to their love.

What is an Art Farm?

These days with lots of attention to localvore culture, “know your food, know your farmer,” food politics, etc, the link between art and agriculture seems less often explored, rarely celebrated.  We began musing on this theme in ’01 while living on Chicago’s North Side (population density of >4,500 people per square mile) and later in ’06 when we settled in Maine (population density of 41 people per square mile).  Big change in surroundings.  No change in interest.

Along the way we heard about Farmer John at Angelic Organics, about the folks at the Wormfarm Institute (two sculptors who left Chicago to farm in southern Wisconsin), and the Bread & Puppet Theatre that ends each performance by sharing with the audience bread made by the cast and crew.  Nance Klehm, a farmer, forager, social ecologist and good friend, in ‘08 taught a class at the UCLA School of Art on the topics of: “place and participation (or which of these bugs are edible?)/cultivating knowledge, participation, food in the age of monoculture/practical and critical processes for the hungry, lost and restless.”  A Google search now brings up numerous sites under the term “art farm.”

Something is up.  And still it is hard to wrap our mind around what is an art farm.  More readily, we can say what it is not: neither a “get big or get out” USDA sanctioned operation, nor the world of Art as an insurable, bankable asset.  But that doesn’t tell us much.  Stating the affirmative, we could say this is equal parts “Cheap Art Manifesto” (see blog of 19 May) and a hands-in-the-dirt connection to the earth and ourselves.

Art-making is a behavior.  Hard-wired into our DNA, it is a biological inclination.  In a nutshell, this is the argument put forth by Ellen Dissanayake in her book What Is Art For?: “My own notion of art as a behavior…rests on the recognition of a fundamental behavioral tendency that I claim lies behind the arts in all their diverse and dissimilar manifestations from their remotest beginnings to the present day.  It can result in artifacts and activities in people without expressed ‘aesthetic’ motivations as well as the most highly self-conscious creations of contemporary art.  I call this tendency making special and claim that it is as distinguishing and universal in humankind as speech or the skillful manufacture and use of tools.”

What if art-making is not an attribute of society, but antecedent to society.   Could it follow, then, that agriculture emerged as a “making special” adaptation?  Are we putting the horse before the cart?  These are questions we strive to grasp.

An art farm is about “place and participation” where obstacles become opportunities.  We live in a rented house in South Portland, Maine.  When our landlord said we could not have a garden, we made arrangements to plant a shared garden at the home where our daughter goes for day-care.  And from that place we are now harvesting greens that feed our family.  A few miles away, down by the Marsh, with Farmer Martha we are raising hens and, soon, broilers, and from the orchard, come autumn, again we will pick apples, press cider, make cobblers and applesauce.  With a lot of sharing and creativity we are making do with what we have.

And as we go forward, we will tell the tales, share the stories and paint the pictures here at our blog, while the answers work themselves out.  They always do.