Walking with Prayer Trees: Everyday Magic, Day 1,126

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
Aug 29
3 min read

I believe this is a story tree, likely 300-400 years old

In the middle of the forest, I fell in love with ponderosa pines. For some years when I visited them each summer in the Black Forest at the Benet Hill Monastery (where I co-lead a spiritual writing retreat with Joy Roulier Sawyer), I felt like they were old friends. Plus, their bark smells like vanilla, toffee, rum, caramel or some combination of all, depending on the tree and your nose.

This isn't the first time I've fallen hard for a tree. When I first went to the Rockies in 1983, I fell madly in love with aspen trees, jumping out of the car to hug them whenever I could. They seemed and still seem like baby giraffes to me. But with the ponderosas, it's a deep kind of gratitude and awe. They also seem like the most highly intelligent beings on the planet.

A likely 300-400 year old burial tree and me 3 years ago

Turns out there's so much more to story, in fact, there are story trees with horseshoe-shaped branches to transmit narratives to the Ute people across generations. Among the Ute prayer trees are burial trees to memorialize a great leader or medicine person, grandmother trees which sound like they can also be story trees, pointer trees to aim people toward sacred sites, and prophesy trees that point toward the future. Using ropes made of yucca and perhaps other material, the Ute, hundreds of years ago, started with young trees and guided them to turn, twist, fold, or extend various ways over generations. They would also strip bark or make indentations for special significance.

What amazes me even more is how tree shaping didn't just take a few decades or a lifetime, but many generations. Most of the 300-400-year-old trees I was loving on were what is called culturally-altered as well as protected by the sisters of Benet Hill. The forest I kept wandering was once a Ute reservation, and before then, part of the vast territory of the Ute, extending through southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. The tribe's story from the 1800s onward mirrors the tragedy of many tribes forced into smaller and smaller parcels, but the Ute did successfully won back over 250,000 acres, a fraction of their land, in the late 1930s.

Two ponderosas trained to come together, quite likely a solstice/equinox set of trees. Look between them for the changing light.

The trees haven't migrated as much as the Ute people, but there are clearly pockets of them in abundance, such as the pockets at the monastery and nearby areas. Many more of them co-exist, likely often among people without a clue as to what woods they're walking through.

I was one of those people until Ken and some friends met up to check out the Ute prayer trees at Fox Run Regional Park, so close to Benet Hill that I started researching. But it wasn't until I walked the forest, daily and often two or three times each day, that I started seeing them in earnest. The mild hills of the land -- the foothills of the Rockies with Pikes Peak always photo-bombing us -- challenged me a little because the 7,500-foot altitude but the trees brought me a sense of homecoming. After all, we ourselves are culturally-altered beings, not so much with ropes but surely over generations.

At the same time, I found such inspiration in beholding these trees that tell stories of how to live or what's to come, point us toward what's next or where we've been, help us remember the dead and see the living more clearly -- all made by a people who were forced off the edge of their world as it was once. They faced oblivion and annihilation, if not of their lives surely of their way of living. But the Ute persevere and so do their trees which, like many native people, have been forced to live as if they're strangers in their own land.

I looked up into the trees, listening for the slight wind, then turned my head to see three does lying down in a row. No one was afraid. I lowered myself to the ground to sit among everyone and everything.