This winter we bought and will plant a live Christmas tree, as we have for about a decade. As in the picture of the live Christmas trees and myself in the photo on my author pages, the trees have taken root on family land. This year, we will plant the tree at the home of family who recently brought a baby girl into the world, so the tree marks not only a happy holiday season but also the promise of new life amidst the trials of our human world and the cold darkness of winter.

Through our practice of planting live Christmas trees, we sustain the life of the tree and take part in the flow of life through time. Some live and some die, but as the years pass the surviving trees grow and provide food, shelter and oxygen to animals and the composting of their needles and branches to the fertility of the Earth. They also provide a place for children to play and beauty for all of us to be part of, even in cold winter weather.

The trees we plant will themselves give birth to young trees, forming a family of trees that humans call stands, spreading out from their center into the woods around them. In centuries and millennia to come, the family will reach out to other families of trees of their species, interbreed and make new families, just as animals and we humans mingle and mix our lineages. Lifetime after lifetime of trees will come and go, while the Earth sustains life into unfathomable eons of time. With that same hope, our family gathers around the baby we’ve been blessed to receive and seek to provide for her with the same love and nourishment that the Earth provides for plants and animals growing in natural communities.

As I work to increase my faith in the spiritual world, the planting of the live Christmas trees is part of my learning. In my experience, nature perpetuates itself through partnerships of what we call good works. Plants, insects and animals merge their daily lives, making natural communities that thrive on their mutual work of life. These partnerships and communities, called “symbiotic relationships” and “ecosystems” by scientific-minded thinkers, perpetuate themselves generation after generation, just as human families perpetuate ourselves in mutually supportive communities.

I know from my own, first hand observations that what goes around comes around. When I have acted harmfully, my harm returned to me. When I have acted kindly, I have received many gifts. The Covenant of Good Works is a principle that I have witnessed as a reliable part of life; forsaking it brings harm to those who seek gain without regard of others. Tyrants and tyrannical dynasties rise and fall in the covenant of bad works, in which those who take from others have their gains taken from them in crises and turmoil brought about by their own acts. This is as true for religions, ethnic groups, the wealthy, governments and political parties as much as despots and cruel ruling families. I regard these observations as clear facts of the mundane human world, evident in both the personal and the larger world.

Faith, which my skeptical, fact-minded thinking often lacks, is to believe that the Covenant of Good Works can somehow sustain our lives through the doors of mortality, just as the families of trees we plant will thrive for generations past our short lives. It is a small step to combine the strength of good works in the face-to-face human and natural worlds with the spiritual world I witness life through coincidences in daily life to a faith that through the doorways of death and turmoil lay a perpetuation of life and love.

In my fleeting, mortal and small life my mind cannot fathom the Earth and more than a few generations of lives in it; am I to deny myself the faith to believe in the wonder and beauty of the vast starry winter night and of the Earth as it composts and renews itself in the wintry cold? From a common sense point of view, faith in a benevolent spiritual world is as reasonable as recognizing the strength of the Covenant of Good Works in the vast mystery of the Earth and the nighttime sky. I cannot imagine my mind ever grasping the larger questions that puritan spokespeople claim they know the answers to; but in the beauty of nature and new life, faith seems much more reasonable than cynicism.