For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

by Sasha Sagan

I don’t know exactly what that might be, but there is one ritual I wish we’d at least explored. It’s beautiful, tangible, and appears among disparate cultures: the planting of a tree. A tiny seed is deposited in Mother Earth and soon a new life begins to emerge. In the Balkans it’s a quince tree. In parts of China it’s an empress tree—specifically when it’s a girl. In Jamaica, the baby’s umbilical cord is sometimes buried alongside the seed. There is a Jewish tradition, with Talmudic roots, that calls for the planting of cypress trees for girl babies and cedar trees for boys. When they grow up, their chuppah (the Jewish wedding canopy) is built from these branches. In Piplantri, Rajasthan, in northwest India, the villagers plant 111 trees when a little girl is born: mango, North Indian rosewood, Indian gooseberry. In a world where the birth of a daughter was often seen as a burden, this ritual celebrated it, despite being rooted in grief. It was the invention of a man who once served as Piplantri’s sarpanch (a position akin to small-town mayor). His beloved daughter died very young and he wanted to honor her memory. The villagers planted many thousands of trees but worried termites would destroy them. So the villagers started planting aloe vera, which they believed would kill the pests. Soon there were millions of aloe plants in Piplantri. They didn’t know what to do with them all. But the women of the village learned to make juice and salve, and soon the village grew pros...