September 2nd

The Tall, Tall Trees

Forests have always been magical places in my mind. Some of the earliest stories I remember my parents reading to me were The Wind in the Willows and The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, stories where animals talk and stuffies come to life and amazing things can happen in every adventure. When I was about eight years old we lived in a house in Oakridge (in Calgary) that had no neighbours across the street except for the eastern edge of the Tsuu T’ina nation. This fenced wilderness, just beyond my reach, was imagined in my young mind as a forest of wonder just like the forests of my most loved story books, where any moment the deer or pheasants that emerged to snack on my mum’s bedding out plants might turn around and strike up a conversation. As I got older I experienced the forests of J.R.R Tolkien and C.S. Lewis; the forests of Middle Earth and Narnia and was encouraged in my belief that forests are magical places filled with wonder.

I did not grow up going to sleep away camp and only experienced time in actual forests a few times in my childhood; the cabin in the woods at Lake Shuswap where we spent a couple of summer vacations, the forest surrounding the resort in the Austrian Alps where we went on a short pony ride were the extent of the forests I recall. These occasional experiences did not provide enough information to disabuse me of the idea that forests held some kind of magic, on the contrary they gave me just enough glimpses of the wonder that is a deep, dark forest to confirm that forests must in fact be magical places. 

I was a full-grown adult before I ever walked under the tall, tall trees of Camp Valaqua, and this sacred forest confirmed for me that which I had suspected all my life; that forests were supernatural places, though perhaps not in the ways that my childhood stories had taught me. Forests are the untouched places where God walks among the trees, the sacred undisturbed ground where the Creator can pass by in a storm or a breeze and take a quick look at all of the beauty that still exists on this planet. I have heard God speak in the forest of Camp Valaqua, I know there is much that this sacred place can teach us, so it seemed only fitting to ask the question, What Can we Learn from the Trees? When we look around Camp, what can we learn from what we witness there? This summer’s curriculum is by no means an exhaustive list of the things that nature can teach us about the Creator, but I am hopeful that it can be a jumping off point to encourage campers to see God in creation and to be reminded every time they see a tree, in any setting, that God is there.