Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com.

This is my hinoki tree or, to be more exact, its shadow. The shadow represents, as Carl Jung understood, all the painful things we repress, always at our peril.

I planted my three-foot-high hinoki, a beloved Japanese tree, next to my office half a century ago. Sadly, today, due to climate change and white-tail deer, my tree is not the tall, magnificent specimen it should be, but a misshapen, 12-foot-tall bonsai.

My hinoki’s first near-death experience happened during our infamous 2006 Mother’s Day flood. During that siege, water started rushing into my office, lapping against my books, a fate worse than death for me. The perimeter drains around the office foundation must have failed.

Hoping to fix the problem, I raced out into the deluge to dig up the pipe with my backhoe. But first, I had to move the hinoki that was straddling it. I dug a quick, new hole by the garden and replanted it. Then, I was able to fix the blockage and save most of my books.

As far as the hinoki’s health, it was touch and go. I set up a hose like an IV and watered it daily. It took a year before it regained its color. Then, year after year, it was attacked, not by a swarm of locusts but by an ever-proliferating plague of deer addicted to its exotic foliage.

All of this is background for what happened this morning when I moseyed out to the garden to check if my winter rye cover crop was growing. Instead, I was gobsmacked by this huge, malevolent shadow cast by my hinoki.

Shaking in my boots, I witnessed its shadow turn into the Mark of Cain. While the Bible connects this symbol with divine protection, I see it as a badge of shame linked to the curse that God placed upon Cain. In a similar manner to how the Mother’s Day flood was our badge of shame for how we are abusing the only Mother we have.

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Yet we blissfully ignore the warnings, continuing to shop until we drop, which we will most certainly do in the near future from climate apocalypse. Case in point about our denial: we heard virtually nothing about our impending doom from either candidate during the election that just past.

Compared to most of our country, we are lucky to have a local Paul Revere, who just lost his race to be a Pittsfield state representative. The central theme of his campaign was sounding the alarm about the climate crisis that is lapping at our doorsteps. His name is Dan, the Stoneman, Schroth, well known to Monitor readers for his exploits.

Getting no recognition, he is the lonely outsider exposing the shadow we refuse to acknowledge. In that sense, he is like Jesus, who spoke truth to the money changers in the temple. Dan’s message is similar: “My house shall be called the house of the people and all of Nature’s creatures, but you make it a den of robbers.”