Requiem for a sacred grove

Sacred to me, anyway.

The trees around here are not large and magnificent. They’re scrub oak, and I’ve heard people speak about them very disparagingly. But there’s something magical about an oak grove, even scrub oaks. In fact, I have come to love the scrub oaks; all you have to do to appreciate them is scale down your expectations from the larger oaks found elsewhere.

The scrub oak are highly variable. Many of them grow up, and then send their branches sweeping back down to the ground, creating a sheltered space. Others send low branches out almost parallel to the ground. And some reach for the sky–at their own scale. They have their own kind of beauty and magnificence, but you have to be looking for it to notice it. Over years of walking among them, I’ve learned to look.

This is what I used to call “my settin’ spot”.

It was at about the 35-minute point of a one hour walk–just right to stop and take a brief rest. Here are some more shots taken at different times in and around the grove.

The tree in the middle in the above picture is the the actual “settin’ spot”. The other pictures are what one sees when sitting in that spot. Here’s one of the dogs in the settin’ tree.

This was the entrance to the grove.

There was something about this space that was very restorative to my soul, even in the summer, when it was dry and brown. I often went there when something was troubling me, or I just needed a moment to reconnect with nature.

When my littlest Shiba (that sounds like a book title, maybe for a children’s book–“The Littlest Shiba”) died three years ago, I carried her body out there for one last visit. This is a picture of her taken in the grove on the last walk she ever took, just before she was diagnosed with the cancer that killed her.

I thought about burying her there. Now I’m glad I didn’t.

I set out this morning to take a walk that would take me by there. I was looking forward to resting and communing briefly with the trees when I got there. But this is what it looks like now:

Here you can see the contrast between the natural and the bulldozed land. The grove used to be just to the left of the fence in this picture.

Imagine Joni Mitchell singing “They Paved Paradise” in the background. This isn’t paradise, and they aren’t putting in a parking lot–I understand it’s going to be a housing development–but that’s the way it felt to me when I saw the fence and the bulldozed land.

Here are some more pictures taken on the now-bulldozed land. All this is now gone.

These previously-posted shots were also taken in the area they’ve bulldozed: Surreal, Essence of Poodle, Tree Dogs, and the bird shots from the Walk Photo Gallery. The dogs are in my actual settin’ spot in Tree Dogs, and a couple of the dog shots from the Walk Photo Gallery were also taken from my settin’ spot.

The signs of coming development have been appearing for a few years now, and I know people need housing, and I know this area is short on housing, and I know it’s selfish of me to wish I could have stopped this from happening (to say nothing of absurd to think I could have). But still. It makes me sad.

Someday, in the foreseeable future, there will be no more sacred groves left anywhere in the world, unless something intervenes. In the larger scheme of things, the loss of one scrub oak grove hardly qualifies as a tragedy. And yet–I can’t help but feel that something sacred is gone, that there was a spirit about that land that has simply departed, and that this is a loss worth taking note of. I wish I were more eloquent, so I could do it justice.

Here’s the last picture I took out there. I was sitting in crotch of the settin’ tree, trying to capture the effect of the branches framing the sky.

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