Going Deeper – Writing Workshop

With the Courage of Doves: A Writing Workshop for Witness and Resistance
Rev. Gail Collins-Ranadive

For Contemplation before the workshop, as a practice writing exercise;
“Moral law lies at the center of Nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and
marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal,
preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel?” Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Because my Unitarian faith tradition has roots in American Transcendentalism (Emerson was a
Unitarian minister before he became a philosopher), Nature is my sacred text. Thus I am inviting
you to contemplate a tree: i.e. take a long loving look at what’s real.

If you could have only what tree, what would it be? (Write down your response.)
A deciduous tree symbolizing the changing seasons of your life, or an evergreen that
suggests immortality?

Is it a favorite tree from your childhood, one you climbed perhaps, of perhaps were
forbidden to climb?

Is it a flowering tree, calling to mind the words of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh:
“the almond tree in your back yard is itself truth, reality, your own self. But who has really seen
this tree?”

Carl Jung once told a client: “why not go into the forest for a time; sometimes a tree tells
you more than can be read in books.”

Trees have symbolically had one of the widest ranges of meanings among humans
across our planet. The form of the tree, with its roots imprisoned in the earth, its powerful,
vertically ascending trunk, and its crown that seems to strive toward heaven, has symbolized
the union of the cosmic realms of the underworld, of terrestrial life, and of heaven. These
aspects contribute to the idea of the world tree, whose leaves and branches support mythic
animals, the souls of the deceased or the unborn, or by the rising sun and moon (Herder’s
Dictionary).

And so we know of Hinduism’s inverted tree that symbolizes the unfolding of all being
out of a primal ground; Buddhism’s Bo Tree, under which the Buddha received enlightenment;
Judaism’s tree of the knowledge of good and evil; Christianity’s cross, or Christ’s tree; Islam’s
tree of happiness and good fortune; as well as the tree of eternal life, usually associated with
cultures east of Iraq.

As Alice Walker writes in The Color Purple: “I suddenly knew that if I cut a tree, MY arm
would bleed.” Scientists such as Carl Sagan claim that the oak and the human are molecularly
the same….

And finally, from Emerson again: “If you agree with me, I may yet be wrong. But if the
Elm tree says the same thing, I know I am right.”