Holy Trees of Life

embroidered at every hem, from the river to the sea

Woman dressed in traditional Thobe under a fig tree in Ramallah, West Bank 1920s

I had planned to write to you about bear women this week, about the season of hibernation beginning to surround us in southwestern England, the soft earth filling with denning animals—badger, hedgehog, fox— and tree cavities with honeybees and ladybirds (who have kept coming through my windows and landing on my clothes and hands, seeking warm places to overwinter), and the ghosts of brown bears who once made pathways across the lands of the Dumnonii, who slept in the limestone caves of Torbryan just down the road in the Neolithic, where their bones were found by a local man named James Lyon Widger in the 1870’s.

I’d planned to write to you about Saami bear festivals, about the women chewing red alder bark and holding brass rings to view the “honored guest,” the great bear of the forest as he was brought by the men to a hut made of branches to be skinned and sung over, and how this relates in my opinion to the Norwegian story of the White Bear King Valemon, which Nao Sims and I have been exploring over the past six weeks in her Bear Wife workshop. Honeypaws, they call him in the Finnish Kalevala. Father Brown Bear whose beloved is the Pine Mistress, the Forest Maiden, she who loves him and watches over him and must be propitiated before every hunt. She who marries the bear. She who gives birth to cubs, and then watches her bear husband die, but has learned the way of the bear to bring back to her people.

I was going to write about the memory of brown bears still here in England, how I imagine their spirits sleeping in the hillfort mound, how in this vision when they walk, wild bilberry bushes and extinct orchids that haven’t been seen in a thousand years spring up where their paws have touched, and herds of red deer return, and swarms of bees.

But I’m not writing any of these Year Wife musings in a vacuum, and while the ladybirds are looking for places to winter and the oak trees on the hillfort are turning yellow and the memory of great brown bears stalks me, we are witnessing (which implies the privilege of distance and safety) a worsening genocide, a mass atrocity, a human rights violation of unbelievable proportions.

I’ve cried on and off for days. This can happen? This can happen, and no one can stop it? The UN doesn’t matter, international law doesn’t matter, humanitarian aid doesn't matter? A horrible thing was done to one people, which the world rightly condemns, and so those people are given free reign to enact an even greater horror, which is then not condemned though it kills so many children in their beds that mothers and fathers start writing names on the hands and feet of children before they sleep, in case, in case, in case it comes to it, and they cannot otherwise be recognized?

What I just described should only ever be spoken as some kind of nightmare. Only ever spoken as some description of hell. Not a living reality. But God help us, it is real now.

As I sat down last night to begin transcribing my bear dreamings here, all cell service was cut in Gaza. By an Israeli bomb that targeted the main telecommunication center of the entire strip. It’s in ashes. There is no “turning it back on.” There was already no power at all. Now it’s a total blackout. Even ambulances can’t be called. If your house is bombed and you are wounded, you can’t call for help. Nobody knows what’s going on, or where. People can’t reach their families by any means. The only light people can see by is the light of bombs exploding. Read that again. THE ONLY LIGHT PEOPLE CAN SEE THEIR OWN WOUNDED AND DEAD BY IS THE LIGHT OF BOMBS IN THE SKY.

This is another description of hell.

And then Israel began a ground invasion by cover of darkness and silence, with the world shut out. No witnesses. Only US troops, who are on the ground now too.

When I read about all of this last night, I screamed into a pillow until I was hoarse. I didn’t know what else to do. I called my representatives after that, yes, but that’s beginning to feel like a joke.

There is no cause on earth that justifies the intentional killing of this many children, let alone the terrorization of an entire population of 2.2 million people, whatever the violent and abominable ideologies of their leaders in Hamas (which I obviously condemn, please don’t start). There is no cause that justifies cutting off water, food, electricity and fuel to the point of starvation, disease, surgery by sewing needle with no anaesthesia and vinegar as a disinfectant to an entire population, and meanwhile bombs dropped wherever they go, even when they evacuate where they were told to evacuate, leaving homes that they may very well never see again.

I think about the very small things too, closer to my capacity to even imagine, because surgery with a sewing needle and no anesthesia on wounds caused by shelling is way out of my capacity. But what about people with PTSD, with severe trauma or anxiety already in their nervous systems, who no longer have access to medication? Who have abruptly had to go off medication, in the midst of this level of continued terror and are experiencing withdrawals, psychosis, abject ongoing unbearable panic? Who need heart medication and have to go off that abruptly, risking heart attacks and strokes? Who are in labor, alone? Who are too elderly or disabled to leave their houses?

Mother of God, why didn’t you tell me this could still happen in 2023? Mother of God, why didn’t I ask you, why wasn’t I looking? Did you tell me and I wasn’t listening? Have you shown us, again and again, what we are capable of, but surely it couldn’t happen again, and it was too awful to turn and see?

Well, I am looking now. So so many of us are. We are looking. We won’t stop looking.

Since the blackout began, I’ve listened to an imam crying out to Allah over the megaphone of his mosque, which is the only way to communicate across any distance at this point (the video was uploaded by an Al Jazeera reporter near the Rafah crossing who had an international sim for his phone and was able to connect with satellite service). “None remains but you Oh Allah! Oh Allah!” he cries. It’s unbearable to hear it, and yet I’ve listened over and over because it’s the least I can do to listen, and in his cry is the cry for justice that arrives not through destruction and violence but through God’s peace and protection.

We are each faces of God’s peace. What can we do to spread that peace now?

When I went to sleep I lit a candle in the small clay temple on my dresser that I call my little Motherhouse. I made it out of clay from Mt. Psiloritis on beloved Crete when I was living there two autumns ago, modeled after a Bronze Age Minoan one in the Heraklion museum, which has a goddess with a dove on her head inside. Another people of the olive tree, the pomegranate, the dove. It was made with my devotion to earth, to the Mother, to the Divine, all through it.

Asherah. Astarte. Asasarame. Potnia. Mother of God.

Tree of Life, Tree of Life, Tree of Life, may this light be the light of the tree of life, may the three religions of Abraham find peace far beneath in the roots of their Motherhouses.

I lit my candle to burn through the night while I slept, a light of hope and of miraculous intervention for the civilians of Palestine. I didn’t know what else to do. Light of protection for the innocent. For hostages held in tunnels. (They are still all in the tunnels. I cannot fathom this either.)

For our collective humanity.

We are one body.

We are one body.

We are one body.

It burned until 3 am, when it woke me with its flaring and guttering. It had met the collected wax and a bit of artemisia in the bottom of the vessel from dozens of other candles and was flaring and sputtering. It terrified me when I woke and saw it, because it looked like dozens of bombs falling and setting the earth on fire. I blew it out and went to sleep again with only sorrow in my mind, and on my heart.

This morning, I woke to see the few handfuls of videos that have come through from Gaza show unprecedented bombing done by the cover of darkness, and women in refugee camps screaming and screaming in fear. I woke to find that Israel had spat on the UN’s latest collective call for ceasefire and humanitarian aid. Ambassador Erdan of Israel said and I quote: “Today is a day that will go down as infamy. We have all witnessed that the UN no longer holds even one ounce of legitimacy or relevance.” Legitimacy? Relevance? Since when is it infamous to ask for the protection of 2 million civilians?

Mark my words, we are on very, very dangerous ground now.

And I think I speak for many of us when I say, I have no idea what to do anymore. I call my representatives, I watch and share as much as I can while also trying to remain semi-functional, I talk about this with people in my life, I write, I pray, I scream, I cry. I want to turn away, but my heart won’t let me. My soul won’t either.

We are one body. May this change us all. May the lives of every civilian lost in Palestine at the hands of Israel and the US, and every civilian lost in Israel by Hamas, crack us open all the way, into whatever deeper love and clarity we were meant to live from. May this not crush our spirits. May the veils come off our eyes.

Calypso sat for ten thousand years at the spring fed by waters from the six directions, keeping veiled the heart of the world on her Ogygia. Unveiled, she is Apocalypse. May we rise to meet what she is showing us as sons and daughters of God by whatever name we call that God, each of us responsible in our small ways for being faces of justice, of solidarity, of understanding across religions and races, of love and of courage.

Mother of God, walk with us now. Mother of God hold the children. Hold the mothers. Hold the fathers. Hold the grandmothers. Hold the grandfathers. Hold the sons out in the streets who tirelessly rush from bombed out apartment to bombed out apartment and dig with their hands to free as many people as they can from the rubble— they have only their hands to dig with—and carry other people’s children and wives and grandfathers to stretchers, and go gather food in dangerous areas to bring to central places for everyone. Hold the journalists who risk their lives daily to capture footage no one should ever have to film or witness— so we know, so we see what is unthinkable to have seen.

Mother of God, hold safe the hostages in tunnels underground. Hold the families in Israel who are grieving. Hold the families around the world who are grieving loved ones who are far away. Hold those vulnerable to Anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate crimes all across the earth.

I dreamed four nights ago that I stood before the bones of Mary Magdalene. It was a another night of little sleep, when I woke thinking this is the hour they drop the bombs, what is it like to know that, fuck how can that be. There were two other dreams of great vividness, but Magdalene was her own immensity in the center of them.

In the dream there was a kind of shrine, with cists in the shape of her skull and crown and body that held the bones. The very bones, the very bones, I kept saying to myself in the dream. I was surprised to be there; it was as if by accident. One minute I was in another dream, the next I was at this shrine with her relics in the middle of what seemed to be a busy place almost like a fair, where two springs also flowed. I stood totally still. Whoever I was with had wandered off. I was transfixed. Her shrine had something rich about it, the colors of it maybe or the materials, though I don’t remember. A sense of very dark rose, or red. Saffron too. I could hardly believe I was looking at vessels that held her bones.

Mary Magdalene’s bones? I said to myself, and started weeping in the dream. They seemed dark to me, dark as the rosary beads made from my mother’s roses which I have kneaded into clay. Dark and also scented like that.

I was absolutely overcome, both in the dream and when I woke up. Good grief, I thought. I am thinking still. I better pay attention when I’m dreaming of Mary Magadalene’s freaking bones, looking as real and vivid as anything I’ve ever seen in my life.

Mary Magdalene, beloved saint and Jewish woman of the lands of Galilee, born in Magdala which eventually became the Arab village al-Majdal which is now the Israeli town of Migdal. However she loved Christ and however he loved her we will never know, but we do know she was the apostle to the apostles, chosen by him as the one who had embodied and understood his teachings best; the first to see him after the resurrection; one of the few who never left his side on the cross. We also know she was not a prostitute, though it wouldn’t matter to me one way or another if she were.

What matters more to me is that when I close my eyes in prayer and think of her, I always see her with a flame for a heart. She is able to stand before anything and not look away, her heart blazing but contained, a fire that can never go out. When I close my eyes and see her she just looks back, absolutely full of that unwavering fire. It’s like the total pure flame of Christ’s love has become her entire heart. Every time I’ve ever seen her this way, it steadies my whole being. It steadies my being that she is a woman, too, because I can relate to her that way, personally. I feel safe, and I feel known. She is not a virgin like the other Mary. She is not the son of God like Jesus. She is a woman who has known in her body the kinds of things that I have known, and this helps me get closer to the pure love that comes through her.

It’s the same again, I say to her with my eyes closed now, it’s still the same war Mary, you know this war, you do. The power structures switch back and forth, the oppressed become the oppressor, but it never seems to end.

I see her filling the earth with oil of roses, oil of spinkenard, oil of myrrh. I see her anointing the feet of Christ with her hands and her hair. I see the woman at the well, the Samaritan woman, carrying her clay pot on her head. The well where Jesus gave her water was near the field Jacob gave his son Joseph, in the city which was called Sychar then, and today is near Nablus, in Balata village, in the West Bank of Palestine. I see that well overflowing, running deep into the earth in the six directions above below before behind within all around, suffusing every inch of Palestine, every inch of Israel, every body wounded, every person killed, every heart either murderous or peaceful, with the water of God by all God’s names.

I see that there is a place just this side of time, just alongside now, just inside its wings, the other side of the feathers, the inside of the dove’s heart, where it’s not white phosphorus falling on Gaza but almond flowers and tiny olive blossoms, all out of season from trees that were taken from generations of families in 1948, trees that are ghosts now, burnt to nothing a long long time ago; and where it’s not blood but holy water that’s running from the well of Joseph, which is the well of Nablus which is the well of God and God’s Mother, the water that falls from a woman when she begins her labor, the water that equalizes us all: children of mothers, children of fathers, children of life and soil and birds and trees and stars.

I see women standing under the falling white petals and the rising pure water in clothes embroidered with trees of life— Jewish women, Muslim women, Christian women, women of ten thousand years ago who worshipped Asherah or Astarte or another. Each family and village and faith adds its own flourishes to the hems that protect their daughters, and through their daughters all the children born. Each grandmother’s pattern passed on shows a slightly different shape of tree, or fruit, a different way of embroidering the birds, a different dye for the thread to be so blue. But all of them are trees of life.

One tree.

There are a thousand neglected places in you and on this earth that want to be loved, I seem to hear Mary say. Bring love back to one of them with all of your might, and you will bring love also back to yourself, and from there it will never stop flowing across the whole world.

Palestinian woman in traditional dress in Nazareth, 1910

Practically Speaking-

Obviously, there are also all the tangible things. Call representatives to speak up in the name of human rights and international law if you are American, MPs if you are British. Sign petitions, send a portion of your sales if you have your own business to the Palestinian Red Cross or to MECA who are actually inside Gaza gathering food to redistribute in dangerous areas.

And; learn new things about this world and the way it has come to be around us. I didn’t know nearly as much as I should have about the apartheid that exists in Palestine because of Israel until two weeks ago. I’m reading everything I can now, especially the voices of the artists. Poets and novelists, as many women as I can, and folktales from the people, which are the earth speaking, the fig trees and olive trees and gazelle.

Do not think for a second that it is anti-Semitic to do so. I believe it’s the opposite. When we honor the experiences and voices of the oppressed, silenced, subjugated and occupied in one place, we honor them throughout history. We honor those who died in the Holocaust, and those who survived it. We resist the weaponization of Jewish trauma in the Holocaust by the British and American governments who handily stuck thousands of devastated survivors in a territory which they had their own absolutely selfish aims toward, and then militarized them into one of the deadliest and most well armed forces in the world. We resist the weaponization of that same trauma now. We allow ourselves to see the histories of all colonized places more clearly, and begin to act with more care. Read this piece, “Kaddish for the Soul of Judaism,” by Amanda Gelender, a brilliant Jewish writer, for her perspective and soulful words. Or the perspectives of women in the Israeli-founded Women Wage Peace.

I am trying to be kinder to the people around me, even when I am really activated and exhausted and scared and angry and trying to launch that anger anywhere I can. Be kinder still, I tell myself. Give thanks for the clean water you are drinking. The safe bed. The privilege of your white skin, if you are white. Do something with it. Give thanks for the abundant food in your kitchen. The land that sings around you right now. Protest if you can, where you can, however you can, whether it’s in marches or prayers or poems or seeds you are planting.

This is a matter of heart and of the human spirit, not politics. Let this time change your heart accordingly, to hold more and more feeling, more compassion, and empathy even in the face of fear, including for yourself. Take it slowly, but don’t stop. Cracking open is the only way through any of this, I believe.

So I am letting my heart break. I am letting it scream, and open more, until that opening can become, I pray, a robust fountain. Full of living water. Almond blossoms. Olive blossoms. Trees of life.

Peace and liberation for all.

Books I Have on My Shelf Now—

Salt Houses, by Haya Alan

Journal of an Ordinary Grief- by Mahmoud Darwish

My First and Only Love - by Sahar Khalifeh

Gate of the Sun, by Elias Khoury

Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, edited by Ibrahim Muhawi, Sharif Kanaana, and Ibtisam Barakat

19 Varieties of Gazelle- by Naomi Shihab Nye

A Woman is No Man- by Etaf Rum

Minor Detail - by Adania Shibli

And a far better-informed-than-I-am reading list here.

from “Passing the Refugee Camp,” by Naomi Shihab Nye in 19 Varieties of Gazelle