American journalist William Weston – the first foreign reporter to be allowed into the country of Ecotopia (formerly the American region encompassing Northern California, Oregon, and Washington) offers his first impression of Ecotopian religion:
This got very exciting. Eyes shining, she leapt out of tub and ran out the door, dripping. I looked after her, surprised. She jumped back in the door, did a comic but enticing little dance, out the door, laughing, in again, and never saying a word. I sprang out and after her, down a forest path. She’s damn fast, and also good at dodging around trees. We got into deeper forest. Suddenly, ducking around a particularly huge redwood tree, she disappeared into a hollow at its base. Springing in after her, I found myself in some kind of shrine. She was lying there on a bed of needles, taking deep, gasping breaths. Dimly visible, suspended on the charred inside of the tree, were charms and pendants made of bone and teeth and feathers, gleaming polished stones. It was as if I was being sucked into the tree, into some powerful spirit, and I fell on her as if I were falling freely through the soft air from a great height, through darkness, my reportorial self floating away.
We must have made love for hours. Cannot describe. Will not.
Finally we got up and returned to bath house, Marissa pausing as we left the tree, mumbling something I couldn’t catch. Dawned on me that it was a prayer of some kind and that this incredible woman is a goddamn druid or something—a tree-worshipper!
