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Bringing Healing to the Spirit of a Land and Its Peoples

Established in 1995, The Cedar Tree Institute is a nonprofit organization providing services and initiating projects in the areas of mental health, interfaith collaboration, and the environment. Based in Northern Michigan, it offers mental health services on an individual basis, works with faith communities and environmental groups, and is involved in ongoing partnerships with the US Environmental Protection Agency, the United States Forest Service, and five American Indian tribes.

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Newsletter

Ecotone and Equinox Newsletters

Lake Superior
EcotoneNewsletters

Winter 2026 Ecotone Newsletter

The festivals of the world religions lift up promises of hope during cold, dark winter nights. This is a season for prayer and song. Barry Lopez, a naturalist and award-winning author, once wrote that it may be prayers alone that hold back the world from destroying itself. Everything is connected, he wrote, by those pleas from the human heart. Hidden. Unseen, yet strong, enduring as steel. Years ago, a group of us met to send off a student about to be deployed to Iraq. We blessed him that evening with a thousand-year-old liturgical prayer, handwritten on the inside cover...
Fall 2025 Equinox Newsletter
EquinoxNewslettersWater Stewards II

Fall 2025 Equinox Newsletter

Things are not what they appear. That observation, if you agree with it, is disruptive. If we’re honest, it can also bring a sigh of relief. Autumn in the Northern Great Lakes Basin is beginning. A remarkable shift in the forest’s appearance will make itself known. It remains startling to remember that leaves, for the most part, actually don’t turn color. The changes we witness shifting in the forest’s colored canopy occur as green chlorophyll fades. Each fall, leaves of deciduous trees reveal their true colors. The dazzling display was hidden in the summer We just didn’t see them....
Spring 2024 Equinox Newsletter
EquinoxNewsletters

Spring 2025 Equinox Newsletter

Sometimes, on the edges of life in Michigan’s small towns during cold, hard winters, there are unexpected moments revealing sudden, single streams of light. Such times pierce the deepest darkness of fear and isolation, part of the human condition we all, in one way or another, secretly share. This account, for me, offered such an experience. I received permission to share it with you from the family and medical provider involved. My colleague is a hospice medical director. A former family medicine doctor, he regularly visits patients facing their last days of life. Unlike some medical providers, he’s come...
Lake Superior
EcotoneNewslettersWater Stewards II

Winter 2025 Ecotone Newsletter

Gently turning over the chimney glass of an oil lamp in my hands, I use a soft cloth to remove streaks of soot from the lamp’s recent use in our cabin’s sauna. It’s a task I regularly attend to. For a couple of special reasons. First, it connects me to my grandmother Ada, who grew up in a sod-framed Kansas farmhouse in the 1880’s. She left home at sixteen, headed alone to Denver on a coal-burning steam train. Purchased a guitar there, found work cleaning houses and providing child care for the wealthy. From family’s archives, we’ve learned she...
Equinox Fall 2024
EquinoxNewslettersWater Stewards II

Fall 2024 Equinox Newsletter

As far as music goes, there are special moments, I think most would agree, that have shaped each of us in unforgettable ways. In my case, there was a joy-filled accordion player during my youth. On the North Shore of Minnesota, a sixty-year-old family friend made the world dance for me during summer nights as our family gathered at his family’s log cabin which he’d built with his own hands. Then there was a particular solo, sung during a wedding in Seattle, based on a folk tune from Appalachia. You could hear a pin drop in that sanctuary because...
Spring 2024 Equinox Newsletter
EquinoxNewsletters

Spring 2024 Equinox Newsletter

I’m sitting in the office of a 45-year-old police officer. We’re in a modest brick building a few hundred yards up a ridge overlooking the harbor of a small fishing town in Alaska. I’m curious how he sees the human heart. What he’s learned from over 20 years working in this one-time booming salmon fishing community known as the Gateway to the Inland Passage. He tells me the homeless population soared here in recent years, as it has across most cities and towns in North America. He mentions the increase in crystal meth use, the influx of illegal drugs...

Spirituality and Environment

Articles on Spirituality and the Environment by the Institute Director along with occasional guest writers.

The Return Documentary