Tammerie Day is one of 10 persons that the Religious Naturalist Association is honored to have officially endorsed as a chaplain. She wrote this beautiful poem in 2020.
Oh, Trees. You have searched us and known us.
In our rising up and our lying down, in our walking days and sleeping nights, you companion us and shelter us.
In our hunger and our need, our loneliness and fear, you feed and comfort us.
You give lie to the myth of isolation, your forested com-unity proving love and sky fill every interstice with life. You give fruit and shade, bark and heart. You are the lungs of our world, the cascading net that holds this good earth together under our feet. We are nowhere and nothing without you.
Your bare branches inscribe calligraphy against the wintering sky, traces of exultation shimmering off your twig-tips. In-spire us to raise our hands to you and with you, into the sky of love, instead of against you and each other.
Reach into us with your radical rootedness; tap into our moments of knowing and infuse us with deeper story, wilder wisdom, longer love.
Slow our maddened pace; gentle us to the sure courage of grace.
Measure our steps and open our hearts to the steady and irrepressible flow of justice, through us and in us and to each other, imago arbor, amen.
Tamerie Day, Forest Psalm