Kathryn Knight Sonntag‘s first collection of poetry, The Tree at the Center, is being published by By Common Consent Press today. In this post she talks about the path that brought her to this collection, and the ideas behind it.
I began writing poetry as a young child and continued through college, taking classes from incredible writers like Jacqueline Osherow at the University of Utah. After completing degrees in English and environmental studies, I considered an MFA in poetry but felt compelled to pursue something that would tie me more directly to the land. After completing a master’s in landscape architecture and environmental planning, I had my first child and felt a deep need to go back to my primary form of expression. I had studied the Tree of Life from the works of authors such as Roger Cook, Margaret Barker, and Mircea Eliade for my master’s thesis and was led to an even deeper personal engagement with this sacred symbol as a new mother. Interpreting my discoveries about the divine feminine, as well as my experiences with motherhood, became a work essential to my own peace of mind and consumed me for the better part of two years. I felt a deep need to recreate myself and my theology through the eyes of a Mother I was discovering through scripture and experience. I felt called to do it. I shared a lot of my work with a dear friend and she encouraged a vision of a book coming together.
Now I work as a landscape designer and many of my projects are Latter-day Saint temple landscapes. As I draw and visit these sacred spaces, I often wonder where the symbol of the Mother resides. If She is not in the garden and not in the Holy of Holies, where is She? Latter-day Saint women around the world grapple with these urgent questions: Where is a divine feminine figure located in LDS theology? Where does she lodge here on Earth? And because there isn’t a prescribed answer, every woman must find Her for herself. The Tree at the Center is my poetic response to two years of study to find answers to these questions, a journey that has lead me to an ever-evolving image of what it means to return to the Mother Tree.
The Tree of Life has for millennia been a symbol of the Divine Mother. In the Old Testament, the tree is the representation of Asherah, the Great Mother to the ancient Israelites. She represents eternal life in the most primal sense, as the preserver of the interrelationships of all beings and the Earth around them.
Abraham’s earliest form of temple worship was altered by King Josiah in the sixth century BCE to adhere with The Book of the Law, discovered during the temple’s renovation. The worship reforms of supporters of this law code caused the loss of many plain and precious things, including the older ideas, symbols, possibly entire rituals, and forms of words from the temple, including Asherah, Lady Wisdom. The removal of Asherah from the holy of holies of the temple was the removal of the urtext of women; the sacred script that unfolded their role in salvation, their unique language, their unique voice. It was the rejection of ecological wisdom, the mysteries of creation.
Ultimately this new-found knowledge lead me to believe that having women in the built spaces and theological discourses of Mormonism is more than just a matter of equal representation; it is a matter of survival and salvation.
With our female Archetype absent from the discourse and relatively little language to describe Her, Mormon women are left with fewer resources than they need to traverse the terrain of their experience. I was left to answer the question: What does it mean as a woman to represent the Creatress, the natural world, in a time of ecological unraveling and with the silence of women just breaking?
The root of our ecological crisis lies in our separation from The Tree. Humankind’s large-scale environmental degradations prove that the forces of industrialization perceive that natural systems’ inherent value is inferior to extractable resources for immediate human consumption. The pride behind the wanton destruction of eternal networks in the physical and spiritual spheres of the wild is the same pride that removed the Divine Mother from Her temple throne, and attempts to accelerate the silencing of women.
The Tree at the Center is an eco-theological work that delves into the meaning of female exile and reveals that a new language is part of the way forward. Three instantiations of The Tree—the Tree of Ascent, the Tree of Fertility, and Asherah the Tree—all find expression in my contribution to the ancient but new vernacular for Mormon women. The Tree at the Center seeks to revive and revivify the Mormon people’s relationship with nature and the wilderness Mother who is not separate from us. This is the story of women that has only been whispered peripherally in Mormonism. Women feel the presence of their exiled Mother, find Her encoded in the symbology of the temple and the wild earth, and are ready and waiting to participate in Her deciphering.
“As a Mother”
I lie on my side
in the cool of our maple.
Your small body balances
against the curve of my hip.
I speak to you and hear
myself as if from across a room—
a phenomenon of postpartum.
I never desired to be a symbol,
but since the Feminine Divine
brought up your soft round
warmth from my depths
crawling on my chest to coo and sigh, I
am one working prism of Her endless
blinking body.
My voice is your sacred pole
holding up the sky.
It rises from my frame, leaving
Earth, to collapse
space and time—and returns here
to the grass, to
the soft pink
of dusk.
The Mother’s Om
moves around your twists of bone
and muscle, then further
back to the shadowy
chambers of deeper knowing
each smaller than the one before, spiraling
toward the final and the first—
the holy of holies.
I never asked to be the center,
the eternal tree,
a venus belly,
etched. But as your sweet body
latches to my breast, I
am Eve, the sun of my son—
who will carry the tree through himself
when he multiplies
and replenishes the earth.
Kathryn Knight Sonntag has a BA in English and a BS in environmental studies from the University of Utah and a Master’s in landscape architecture and environmental planning from Utah State University. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including: Shades: The University of Utah’s Literary Magazine; Wilderness Interface Zone; Young Ravens Literary Review; Exponent II; Psaltery & Lyre; and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. The Tree at the Center is her first published collection.