About the Voicing the Natural project. The world speaks in a language of weeds, flowers, ancient trees, new saplings, gardens, wild spaces, deserts, forests, and mountains. To hear its poems, songs, and words, all we must do is listen. This blog is an ode to my allies. Click here to learn more.
Voicing White Pine
Here at the edge of the waters, I will remember you, long after your departure. I see your humanity and in your flaws, here, a branch of peace for your grieving, your joy. Hold hands with my branches, for they brush with their wisdom against your cheeks, the way I can remind you of our kinship. Our histories intertwined, ancestors imperfect, and yet, and yet. Peace is wholeness, is a reminder that wholeness comes in many shapes. Sit with me, back against the trunk, trunk against back. We are not so different. Remind yourself of the song, the one that speaks of me as guardian, crafts the world.
White Pine, Pinus strobus
When the wind speaks its name across the forests of my homeland of Michigan, the Eastern White Pine often responds with its own name, the sound that the needles make as they brush against each other. White Pine is a tree often associated symbolically with the word peace. This association with the word was woven first by the Indigenous peoples of this land. In Michigan and Anishinaabemowin, White Pine is known as Zhingwaak or Zhingwaakwag.
I know this tree in my bones as White Pine, the tree of peace, tree of shelter, tree of wayfinding.
My mentor Robin Rose Bennett writes in The Gift of Healing Herbs, “When you are at peace, your breathing is deep, relaxed and rhythmic. Conversely, when you are stressed, your breathing can become shallow and ragged. If you are agitated, you can bring yourself to a more peaceful state of being by drinking white pine needle tea as a medicine and, if you like, as a simple ritual.”
You can identify White Pine by its five fascicles, instead of the two needle groupings of Red and Jack Pines. If you hold one of these groupings across your cheekbone, the softness of the tree is another sign of itself.
Dana O’Driscoll writes about Pine, “White Pine, both physically and energetically, appears to be able to draw things out. This is true not only of the pine pitch but also of the simple presence of pine.”
And as I drink cups of white pine tea, or add the tincture to warm water, I can feel the gentle tug of the tree. It’s subtle and speaks in languid speech. As I write this, I say hello to the White Pines that create the yard's architecture as it rolls to the lake. They are towering, yet gentle guardians. Eastern White Pines can reach up to 150 feet, yet their stature seems to transcend this number, allowing them to reach somehow higher. White Pine puts its ear to both the heavens and the underworld.
While my external nature matches the surface of the calm lake, my mother calls home. The inside truth has always been much choppier, waters churned by anxiety, the desire to please people, the fawning, the freezing, the fleeing. And Pine meets these waters head-on, a boat that has been storm weathered, that speaks and listens to clouds and quick winds. As I hold Peace in my hands, I discover that Peace is a relationship and not a static state, but a home, under the cathedral of a White Pine to return to again and again.
In the third year of my apprenticeship with Robin Rose, Eastern White Pine and I decided to ally. Though I have known this tree, the state tree of Michigan, my entire life, we reconnected on the ridge and the trail to Surprise Lake, from Robin’s house. I have been told that Pine grows on the ridges because they can embrace the cold, the wind, and the rock—a metaphor and the real and tangible truth. A friend, experiencing the death of her father, and I walked, pausing as White Pine spoke to us. And we fell into the tree’s arms, allowing the needles in our hair and skin to catch up in our summer clothes. I crafted oils, tinctures, and salves from the Pine.
I experimented with Michigan beeswax, allowing the oils and the wax to melt and reform together. There is no one right way to heal a wound, to become new, to listen to the world, Pine seems to say. Pine instructs, “Forgive yourself,” then understands when I can’t.
Pine was a contested part of the logging industry that stripped parts of my Michigan bare, laid waste to landscapes, stealing the homes of creatures everywhere. This legacy is one that I cannot pretend to grasp in my hands now.
My soon-to-be husband is a carpenter (and, for this piece, a self-proclaimed singular and humble woodworker) and describes working with White Pine as, “soft and accessible.” He describes the knots in the wood, the waxiness of the wood, and yet the versatility and the practicality of the wood. He reminds me of the phrase “old pine box,” a reference to a simple burial coffin or casket. A reminder that death is a blessing that waits for all of us, trees, and humans, Pine knows this story, and makes space for our flawed and beautiful decay.
As he and I spend some time at the lake in early August, we see a doe and three fawns emerge from a cluster of White Pine and Cedar trees, that seem to love the sand and the silt that embraces the lake. They nibble at the edges of the treeline, their knock knees kissing the water, they don’t notice us on the calm waters, and we watch. Peace is sharing space with these more than human beings, kin. Peace is holding the unknown. Peace is a Pine, planted in the earth.