wood grain of an oak
In this post I want to talk briefly about how I composed the “Tree Prayer” I posted last July. The earlier post has enjoyed a recent burst of new attention, so it looked like a good candidate for further discussion.
Oak, shade my path. I welcome your wisdom.
Birch, green my way. I call on your courage.
Hemlock, heal my heart. I fast under your foliage.
Pine, scent my dreaming. I gather your gifts.Tree companions all, I seek the shelter of your boughs.
May my days make return for your abundance.
One of the goals of the bard is to get those words into memory that we want to keep there. Songs, poem, rhyme, mantra, chant — all rely on rhythm and echo (which is what rhyme is) to transmit words into brains so they stick. Whether for prayer or entertainment, history or mnemonic, the form that we give our words makes them either easier or harder to recall.
(A snappy campaign slogan can help win an election, just as a bad one can sink it. Likewise with advertising. If you’re like me, you’ve got ad jingles in your head you never needed to memorize — repetition alone did the trick. I date myself with an old car-sales jingle that lasted into the 1960s: “See the USA in a Chevrolet …” Long before I was anywhere near driving age, or had any need to know about it, Detroit supplied me with corporate earworm propaganda, linking Dinah Shore, patriotism and purchasing that particular brand.)
I’ve long been fond of alliteration, also sometimes known as “consonant rhyme”. While a vowel rhyme could work fine, I find it can also be a distraction. There’s also too much “moon-tune-June” rhyming all around: greeting cards, song lyrics, and — gods help us — even dirty limericks in restrooms. So alliteration it is.
First, I chose local trees, species I can see from the house: oaks in the back yard, a line of hemlocks defining our northern property, pines along the eastern periphery, and birches across the road to the west. If you’d like to shape your own tree prayer, look to trees that stand near you for help. Maybe you want a seven-tree prayer, combining the properties of seven with a variety of local species that matter to you. Maybe you want to use the Druid triad form, and name just three.
What do “my” trees offer? Most of our oaks are mature, and thus excellent shade trees. As the pre-eminent “tree of the Druid”, sharing with it the *dru, *deru, *doru- root in many Proto-Indo-European languages, they endure as “trees of wisdom”.
Birches are pioneer trees, among those species that first appear in barren or “disrupted” areas where an eco-system has faced a fire or other dramatic change. They’re also the tree often associated with bards, sharing the same first letter in several languages (and opening the ogham alphabet), so “green my way” came pretty naturally.
The hemlocks are long-lived, tough (though the hemlock woolly adelgid continues to wreak havoc among them) and possess astringent and antiseptic medicinal properties that a good herbal will elaborate on. “Heal my heart” combines these qualities.
Finally, the smell of pine yields an easy association: “scent my dreaming” picks its way among words that suggest pleasant smells (English shows a curious paucity of “good-smell” words, though we have stench, reek, stink, fume, etc., for bad ones. Japanese has the verb kaoru “have a good smell” and the girl’s name Kaori “fragrance”.)
As with vowel rhyme, less can sometimes be more. I asked readers to try out and live with the tree prayer, and some of the comments suggested people were doing just that. Work with a prayer that involves another being, and often you’ll get nudges on its sound and form that work for you.
The first four lines of the prayer took me approximately an hour of meditation and drafting and revision.
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Images of oak and forest: Pexels.com
A Druid Way 