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Wood. As in trees. Even in a desert, or perhaps especially in a desert, I turn to trees. Figuratively, consciously, I do so while I sit down with an early morning cup of coffee to leaf through a Christmas-gift book, directly enough titled "The Tree" (by Jenny Linford), letting my gaze flow over the marvelous color photographs inside.

My mind is carried to the many places of honor that trees hold in our lives, and in our histories as cultures and even as a species.

As I do this, my eye lands upon the lights of our Christmas tree, temporarily forming the focal point of this room. I had meant to cut a Christmas tree this year, even got the State Land Office permit, but then a conspiracy of weather, time and a lack of traction turned me instead to buy from a tree lot. Still, it's a nice tree, open (so the ornaments have a place to hang), with sturdy branches capable of holding up said ornaments.

Me being a modern, secular, nonethnic gypsy-American, there are few deep holiday traditions that I ground myself on. But the tree is one such anchor, hewing back as it does into history, tying me to tribal ancestors worshipping the natural world around them. It may not mean the same to me as it did to them, but it does hold meaning.

Outside, bare brown branches tickle the low belly of clouds that have moved in. Evergreens like the line of tall Arizona cypresses that face me across the street, and short, squat arbor-vitae pyramids that guard my neighbor's front yard from the assaults of the world, are good reminders that life endures.

So is the solstice just past, though my modern instincts do not yet discern the subtly increasing light that presages the coming warmth and regrowth. The orchard will bloom another year, praise be.

My eye returns to the page — the page which is made of paper, which is made of wood. I sit on my wooden-framed futon couch, feet on the cedar-wood chest in front of me. On the other side of the room, a room whose dimensions are realized through the wonder of wood framing, whose structure is as sound and true as that wood, the beckoning maw of the fire place sits patiently waiting its next feeding of wood.

I realize that despite uncounted millennia of evolutionary change, we have not come out of the trees. Or rather, we have, only we have brought the trees with us. Where once we climbed up into their branches to shelter, we then brought down branches and made our shelter from them. Where once we combed their branches for food, now we plant and tend those same branches for the food they produce.

And what was one of the tools that allowed us to leave the safety of growing branches? Why, fire of course - that Shiva-like killer and rejuvenator of forests.

But are we then the masters of the trees? Does ability equate right? Because we can cut down forests to make more cardboard boxes to ship more TVs halfway around the globe, should we?

Certainly more than trees depend on us, we depend on them. Not only for the direct uses we have for them and their parts, not only for the sense of beauty and nobility they inspire in us, but for the very air we breathe.

So, save a tree. Plant a tree. Hug a tree. And throw another log on the fire!