From Food and Water Journal, Summer 1999
Excerpts from an article, Life in a Tree, by Susan Meeker-LowryLife in a Tree
For more than a year and a half, since December 10, 1997, Julia Hill Butterfly has lived on a platform 180 feet up in the branches of Luna, a 1,000-year-old redwood tree named after a full moon that illuminated the building of her platform. Her goal is to save Luna, and all the ancient redwoods on land owned by Pacific Lumber Company (Palco) in northern California — those that haven’t yet been cut...
Susan: Have they cut any old growth while you’ve been there?
Julia: Yes. They cut it all. I sat through a timber harvest….The sound is horrible when these trees go. The first thing you hear is hours of chainsaws. Then they strike a wedge into it (the tree) so they can fall it in a specific direction. You feel it reverberating through the tree into your body, like they are nailing something to you. It’s like being crucified. Literally, and that’s not an exaggeration. You can feel it. Then it creaks and groans and then it literally screams. Finally, the last little thread cracks, and it goes thundering through the baby trees underneath it, shattering everything in its path and smashing into the ground. And everything shakes. The air shakes. The earth shakes. Everything shakes. And I sat through that for three weeks. It was the hardest part of this tree sit.
Susan: You’ve been through a lot in a year and a half.
Julia: Oh, yes. I’ve had to sit through a helicopter hovering over my head trying to rip me out of the tree, and through horrendous storms with winds up to 90 miles per hour that tore limbs off the tree and ripped through my tarps. I sat wrapped in my tarp like a burrito being pummeled with hail and sleet. I suffered frostbite. I was placed under a security blockade for ten days while they tried to starve me down and then they blew air horns all night to keep me awake. But it taught me about letting go of attachments. If I’m not attached, I can bend and flow with the storms of life.
Susan: You sound so peaceful. Yet you’ve witnessed such destruction. How do you deal with it?
Julia: Every time I think about watching the trees falling, I cry. It’s so much a part of who I am I’ll never lose that, nor would I want to. As I watched the trees hit the ground, my initial reaction was to be like a wounded animal and strike back with violence. I could see the Pacific Lumber mill from the tree, and the rows of ancient forest now dead on the ground, and I just wanted to blow it up so it wouldn’t be there to hurt the forest anymore. I wanted to stop those men from cutting the trees. I wanted to stop the pain and the suffering and the violence. But I knew the hypocrisy of stopping violence with violence. It doesn’t work.
To me, the ingredients to live a healthy life are laughter, love, and prayer, and tremendous amounts of all. I just kept praying every day, just holding on to what little threads of sanity I could to make it day by day.
Here we are, I thought, doing everything in our power as a society to destroy the gift of life, the greatest gift of all, while the whole universe continues to give us life anyway. That’s unconditional love in its purest form. I realized then that I had to do everything in my power to return that unconditional love, not only to the Earth, but to the people who were destroying the gift of life.
Love is the source of creation, love is power, love is truth. I’m sure you’ve noticed that in some of the articles abut me they’ve tried to portray me as a fluffy New Ager. Love is not about New-Age thinking, love is the old way of thinking. I talk about revolutionary consciousness. To me that is what this is about. We need a revolution of consciousness.
Susan: Do you see this change of consciousness happening now?
Julia: Yes, although I definitely reach points where I feel hopeless. All around me are clearcuts. I do have a beautiful view. I can see for miles. But in the miles of my view I see the Pacific Lumber mill, I see mud slides, and I see clear cuts. It’s devastating to see that day in and day out. The whole hill behind me is gone. I watched them napalm it with a helicopter. It’s just gone. But the double blessing is that I see consciousness shifting and the triple blessing is that I get to be a part of that. I’m watching it shift in people when they listen to what I’ve gone through. I don’t think everybody’s meant to go climb a tree and live for a year and a half. I’ve done everything in my power to share what I’ve learned through this experience in a way people can relate to.
Excerpts from an article, Life in a Tree, by Susan Meeker-Lowry
Food and Water Journal, Summer 1999
as printed in The Flowering Tree,
Newsletter of The Good Medicine Society, Fall 1999
Contact The Good Medicine Society at windsong@mtnhome.com
or visit our website at www.goodmedicinesociety.com.
