Walking Trees

Celebrating images of the garden and the journey

“We are walking trees,” announced Susan S. Phillips, PhD, while speaking at a gathering of spiritual directors in Mount Angel, Oregon, USA, this past weekend. The Northwest Spiritual Directors Fall Conference 2011 was sponsored by Sacred Path Ministry, and SDI was there to participate and bring you a glimpse of the weekend.

According to Phillips, the journey and the garden are the most prevailing images used in Judeo-Christian scripture to describe the relationship between the holy and ourselves. Just think: the metaphors found throughout the Bible and the Talmud include a tree of wisdom, vines, branches, and a mustard seed. And when we’re not in the garden, we are on a journey, walking like the Israelites toward a land flowing of milk and honey. “Blessed,” reported Phillips, “is a cognate in Hebrew for a word that means ‘on the right path.’” What is holy is inseparable from the image of the journey.

Phillips’s lectures were the cornerstone of the two-day conference. Her scholarly insights on intuition, imagination, the Sabbath, and metaphor provided depth and perspective to the practice of spiritual direction. On the final day of the conference, participants were invited by Phillips to engage with metaphor and draw themselves as walking trees. The results were a collage of color featuring both the garden and the journey, from giant Douglas firs spilling off the page to grandfather oaks spreading acorns across the forest floor.

Reflection: How are the images of the garden and the journey present in your life today? Go ahead, take ten minutes to find your colored pencils and paper, and draw the walking tree that you are in this season of your life. Together let’s discover the orchard of SDI!

Participants Michael Kennedy, Ann Raymond, and Debbie Kohler share the trees that represent themselves.

We are a garden of walking trees!