Green Tribe of Belonging

 If you're a Tolkien fan like I am, you'll remember Treebeard, the Ent. I've always loved the part of The Two Towers that describes tree shepherds, looking much like trees themselves, caring over forests. Treebeard and his fellow Ents kept the forests healthy and safe, but lived with a longing to find their Ent-wives. The story goes that long ago, the Ent-wives had been lured away from their husbands by the excitement of planting crops in a different part of Middle Earth. The Ent-husbands searched for their wives for many, many years. In hopes of luring them back home, they planted beautiful Rowan trees. Quickbeam, a lively young Ent and companion of Treebeard, was in the form of a Rowan tree. And in some places on our own earth today, rowan trees are still called quickbeam. Reading about Treebeard's forest was my first exposure to the Rowan tree. And then just lately, I learned about many deep-rooted traditions associated with the Rowan. It is a treasured tree in the...

 Sitting in my recliner watching a ballgame (one of my favorite things to do), an advertisement captured the screen: Get rid of all bugs immediately! It was a promise to take these troublesome creatures away, kill them, leave us happier and more comfortable. And indeed I, like everyone else, do not love to be bitten by mosquitoes, am bothered by flies. Unless they are getting in our way, it is easy to give bugs little attention. Most of us have been brought up to think of them as pests, and though the importance of pollinators has crept into our collective consciousness, our inclination to get rid of bugs persists: spiders, beetles, ticks, chiggers, flies, gnats, wasps, ants, mosquitoes, and all manner of creepy crawly things. When my daughter Heidi was a toddler, she showed a passionate interest in bugs. She would sit in the garden and explore the caterpillars and the butterflies they would become. She watched the insects crawling up vegetable stems, noticed the holes in the leave...