God and Sex

Chapter 1

A book is round.

To a reader, it unscrolls in a single line, left to right, snaking down the page, wrapping onto the next, but to a writer, it turns more like a wheel.

It rolls out of darkness and catches you up, trapping you inside its circle for a year or ten years, however long it takes.

You move around inside it, back and forth, until finally it releases you, although it never really does, not entirely.

You could say a book eats a writer many times.

You could say it eats itself. In any case, to a writer, the idea of a beginning or an ending is absurd.

I don’t know where this book is supposed to begin.

It could be deep in the action or back in the prehistory, at the river or on the mountaintop; any of them would probably do.

Many times, I’ve opened with the first moment I saw Sarah—cast from many angles, using many tones—and the last moment I saw her, but none have worked out.

I’ve tried starting with dialogue, with the weather, and with quotations, but everything was too tight, or too ponderous, or too forced.

All those beginnings felt like they were coming from up in my throat, not down in my body, where the better writing is born.

Maybe in another writer’s hands they could have become something, but for me, they all felt like carving into petrified wood.

Most writers would have given up by now, but I’ve kept on seeking.

As a writer, I think that’s what you do.

You keep peeling back, you keep whittling.

Eventually, maybe, you find the right phrasing.

And then you move on to the next sentence and do it again.

The next sentence often changes something in the sentence before, and you have to go back and start all over.

Problem after problem, you try to solve it.

What is writing but the solving of impossible problems?

Or like Suzuki said: Nirvana is to see a thing through to the end.

The next beginning I’ll try is the day I met Phil.

Phil, my teacher, my victim. Phil, my good friend.

It’s not the most dramatic moment in the story, but it’s the one I have left, and that must mean something.

Looking back, I can even see where it might be the true beginning after all.

Maybe this was the moment the universe began talking to me, when the veil tore and the signs began coming through.

Maybe it was the moment when God or the devil or whatever it was peered into my world and began laying its traps.

Maybe this very intuition is a message from that entity.

We’ll see. I may not ever know for certain, but this time, at last, I’ll obey.

It was the Tree Book that brought me to Phil.

The Tree Book was my last book, the book following the Light Book, and, in a way, it was Phil’s book, too.

I can’t think of the Tree Book without thinking of Phil and all the contributions he made.

The Tree Book encloses our entire time together.

So to understand how and why I met Phil, you have to begin there.

The Tree Book was a book I’d decided to write in the autumn I turned forty-one.

I didn’t know much about trees at the time, no more than anyone else, anyway, which might seem odd for a person on the verge of taking them as a book-length subject.

But writing a book is never about what you already know.

It’s almost the opposite, in fact. It’s about exploring what you want to know, what you suspect you might be unable to know.

For many reasons, I’d decided I wanted to sit in a room for the next two or three years and contemplate the mystery of trees.

Most obviously, I felt like trees needed an advocate.

Every year, humans destroy some eighteen million acres of them, or about thirty-six football fields’ worth every minute.

In a hundred years, that means we’ll have no rain forests, nor most of the plants, animals, and birds who live therein.

Everyone knows this already, but it seems important to say over and over again until the last tree is gone.

The world is locked in a death spiral. Something must change.

The irony of writing a book in defense of trees didn’t escape me, of course—a screed printed on their own, flayed skin—but as a writer of spirituality-cum-science texts, often with the aspiration of imparting some kind of deeper, mythopoetic worldview, I labor under the belief that even a small book has the power to change the pattern of humanity’s consciousness.

The way I saw it, the more the writers of the world could flood the collective mind with nurturing thoughts about trees, the more likely that we as a species could begin acting toward them in a nurturing manner.

This faith in the power of written words to alter the shape of shared reality, and thus the path of history, is one of the premises of my creative life.

It helped that trees were becoming more popular in the marketplace of ideas.

You could feel the tide of the book industry turning, exiting the long era of quantum spirituality books—all the tomes describing the wacky quarks and superstrings underlying the surface of everyday life—and moving into a more earthy discourse of trees and plants.

People wanted books about the mycorrhizal network now, communication in the rhizome.

They wanted books about the wisdom of the “mother tree” and the secret collaboration of mammals and insects with the vegetable kingdom.

So there was a commercial impulse for writing a tree book, too.

It was a way of attaching myself to the next conversation.

Most of all, though, I wanted to write a tree book because I believed trees had saved me.

After the publication of my previous book, Earth’s Shadow , the Light Book, I’d fallen into a serious depression.

It was my fourth published work and the biggest failure thus far.

Although the idea had seemed promising at the time—a compendium of theories about light through the ages, from the book of Genesis to Max Planck—and the writing had gone smoothly, if not joyfully, the reviews had been lukewarm at best. Not that there were many.

And no invitations to read at festivals, or translations, or prize nominations, either.

It’s hard to express to most people the humiliation of a failed book, the pain appears so abstract and elective, but I can attest, it’s very real.

It plunges the writer into a cauldron of self-doubt, to the point where they no longer trust their own mind.

You start hearing ghost conversations behind your friends’ words and seeing cruel judgments in your absence from every podcast and year-end best-of list. You feel like you’re walking around with your nerves exposed and dangling.

I ended up moving back to my hometown of Ashland, Oregon, and taking up residence in my mother’s house, under the assumption I’d never write another book again.

My mom had moved away a year prior, heading to the East Coast to live nearer her gallery and collector pool, and the property needed a caretaker, so it was a beneficial arrangement for both of us.

I’d always loved my childhood home. It was an elegant, cedar-shake ranch house, nestled among burly black walnut and oak, with big skylights and a lifetime’s collection of art and books and funky tapestries on the walls.

Off the back deck was an expansive view of the Rogue Valley, the ribbon of I-5 piping silent cars north and south, and the nearest neighbor was a hundred yards away.

It was a house of great warmth, comfort, and privacy, and I could stay there rent-free as long as I liked.

Best of all, the property bordered a nature preserve stretching all the way to the Siskiyou Mountains.

When I landed back home, I fell immediately into a new routine, waking up and making myself coffee every morning and heading directly into the forest of cedar and Douglas fir, maple and ponderosa pine, in hopes of getting as far away from myself as possible.

As soon as I got under the canopy, I felt more peaceful.

The trees took me in. They didn’t have any idea what a failure I was.

They didn’t know I hadn’t earned out an advance in three books, or that my writing had never been anthologized, or that my publisher had sold off my paperback rights before the hardcover had even been printed.

They just saw me as another animal walking in their shadows, sending out puffs of carbon dioxide to metabolize.

I’d walk through the ghost fern, craning my neck at the branches above, watching the light filtering through the leaves, and for a few moments, forget the world of human ego and all its poisons.

Under the boughs, breathing the musty scent of the Douglas fir and the sharp, tangy medicine of the sugar pine, I was able to remember, on the most basic level, that the universe was good.

I still remember the moment the idea for the Tree Book struck me.

I was standing at the end of a trail, staring at a grove of cottonwoods shivering in the sun, the delicate triangles of the leaves swishing and spangling, and realized that I wanted to bring the trees inside me.

I wanted to be a tree. What about a small, lyrical book in praise of trees?