The tree house
I’ve never heard a sermon on the probability, but I like to think of Adam and Eve as living in a tree house. I imagine Eve to be a lot like me. If I lived in a garden and got to go around naked and unashamed all the time, I’d want a romantic nest, wouldn’t you? Give me stars twinkling through leafy boughs each night, fresh breezes rocking my cradle in the sky, and dewdrops awakening me with kisses in the morning.
Adam, of course, had missed the universal boyhood fun of building forts and tree houses in his own backyard. I think of him, virile and full of creative notions, seeking just the right tree for a honeymoon habitat. I’m sure it had southern exposure, with wide leaves for protection from the elements and pink blossoms in May. In my fantasy, Adam carved an adult-sized cradle in a giant branch with just enough room to curl up in the arms of his beloved. Padding it with sheep’s woolly fleece and perfumed flower petals, Adam would later carve another niche for their son Cain and then another for Abel. If they’d never been banished from the garden, by the time the world’s first couple held greatgrandkids on their knees, the old homestead would have been as comfy as a well-worn park bench.
Perhaps an entire community of Genesis families eventually made their homes in treetops. Perhaps they became expert climbers like the Koranic people of Indonesia who live in houses up to 150 feet in the air.
For a Western and slightly more modern version of treetop living, you’ll find Tree sort, a resort in the tree-studded state of Oregon that is a summer camp for families. The resort offers lodging in Cabin tree,Treetop, Fores tree, the Schoolhouse Suite, or the Peacock Perch. The only camp rule is that while living in a tree you’re responsible to “make yourself at home.” The Tree House Institute of Arts and Culture, founded by Treesort’s entrepreneur, is the only place in the world that offers vocational instruction in engineering, design, and construction for building tree houses.
So there you have it—no excuse not to live life out on a limb.
Another innovative fellow on the other side of the country was just as eager to branch into the tree-house philosophy. He built the first accessible tree-house prototype for the physically challenged. Forever Young sits solidly atop twenty-one trees in Vermont, with six of those growing right through the middle of its living space. Envisioned as a camp for kids with cancer, the house includes twenty-four screened windows looking out on Lake Champlain. As a place where kids can feel normal for a week, Forever Young is designed to facilitate emotional relaxation away from the trauma of terminal disease and a hospital environment.
“It used to be kid stuff,” writes Smithsonian magazine’s S1ki Casanova, “but these days more and more adults are building in trees to get high.”1 If not to get high, then at least to seek emotional or spiritual restoration. I know of a two-story “tree” house whose bedroom windows are embraced on two sides by the swaying branches of huge pines. Ponderosa needles rustle in the wind against the glass as desert stars glow through. This is a retreat designed for nurturing womblike space that, I believe, may serve to heal childhood wounds of abuse and maternal neglect.
Don’t we all need this in some way?
As Casanave says, anybody may discover the joys of arboreal hideaways. If you can’t build your own right now, you can browse through best-selling books, attend exhibitions, or enroll in a workshop. Online, a multitude of builders offer plans, practical tips, and photographs. One of these,Jonathan Fairoaks, says trees are dynamic organisms that deserve love and attention. He adds, ” the tree is the actual architect to interpret its plans.
Every tree house that has ever been constructed takes on a life of its own, because each tree is as individual as you and me.
The Bible is full of powerful references about trees from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation. Right in the middle, the book of Proverbs declares Wisdom, a female archetype, to be a tree of life to those who take hold of her.
Surrounded on all sides by trees in my own home, I’ve wondered what it takes to survive hundreds or thousands of years like one: What great wisdom would time produce in my trunk, like sap in the very veins of me?
Unlike you and me, trees never stop growing. What better metaphor for survival and wisdom? Until their demise, a tree’s roots are an earth machine operating continuously in the dark and damp. As the fastest-growing part of a tree, they grow more branches and longer branches than the visible trunk. A tree’s roots serve as a mighty anchor to hold itself upright, but the pearly white hairs, fine as a spider’s thread, that shoot from them, are the chief water-collecting mechanism. Wherever there is moisture, they appear suddenly, pushing themselves between soil particles. A root hair will flatten when it finds a film of moisture, then wrap itself around the particle to suck up the water, sending it up the trunk to the leaves. A full-grown apple tree lifts about four gallons of water each hour! In such a perfect ecosystem, chlorophyll, acting with the power of sunlight on leaves, turns the moisture’s salts into plant food. That flows back just beneath the bark to feed every living cell in the tree.
Even when trees die, the so-called “snags” are as necessary to the environment as living trees. Valued as habitat for a host of wildlife, snags are never removed from the scene by the forest service. Nature shows that even burned-out timber is intertwined and interdependent with living things, so a tree never outgrows its resourcefulness. It stands tall, reaches upward, and stays useful just by being there.
The more I’ve reflected on the nature of trees, the more this concept has helped me through rough times. My time spent thinking about trees has taken me from wanting to escape to a tree house somewhere far away to wanting to become one myself.
I vow to think in lofty ways and stretch horizontally as far as I can, touching others around me. I am flexible in hard times and want to stand in a forest of mutual support and community I hope music will be heard from the canopy of my life. Will it be the warbles and whistles of meadowlarks or the screeching of a blue jay? Maybe an artist will sit at my foot and paint a picture of me with fanciflil bird cottages in my hair. Perhaps a freckled child will climb my branches and leave a mailbox for notes to and from woodland sprites.
Everybody needs a habitat, and I’d like to offer strong boughs for people who need a place to nest. Climb into my arms. Curl up in my shade. Tickle my feet with tulips and dandelions.
The poet Shel Silver stein said what I want most—to be a “cozy as can be house.”Let it start right here, right now.