I'm parked under some Sycamores near an old castle ruin in Enniskillen, in Northern Ireland. I notice them almost immediately, I've been struck by how I seek trees to be beside or under, or looking out at when I'm choosing places to stop in Hank Vanigan (my campervan). There are Sycamores outside my house in rural South Sligo and a castle ruin too. A sweet rhyme I only notice now that I write. I remember saying to a friend years ago, 'wherever I go, I have friends', describing my gratitude for my ability to notice and connect to trees. I was enjoying recognising the 'ones I liked', a new-found skill at the time, something the lane was teaching me. I'm not able to name trees encyclopaedically or anything, I enjoy identifying the ones I recognise (see-it-say-it is one of my favourite sports) and will look up leaf shapes from time to time. It's less like Listing and more like recognising a friend, noticing how it is for them, rejoicing if it is a good spot, with lots of light, feeling respect if it is a city setting, knowing roots are maybe working that little bit harder to move through cement-ripple, pave-topped city soil.
I began developing a relationship with the trees around me in or around 2012. I had heard Thich Nhat Hanh reference speaking to trees and listening for answers. I was mildly shocked by that at the time, that someone of such seeming standing in a spiritual tradition (Vietnamese Zen Buddhism) would say such a thing in public. I can trace that double take now to my exposure to the Christian church's feelings about nature and any kind of 'occult' or direct encounter with the (super)natural, which is somehow not the same thing as Christ being risen from the dead and answering people in prayer. I could go on a lengthy digression on the amount of references to nature in the bible in relation to Jesus and his own miraculous work, but we'll stay with Thay for now.
From the van, I can't put my hands on the book I think it's in, but for now, I'll go with memory. He said something along the lines that if you spoke to a tree and listened in stillness, you might hear an answer. I was already walking mindfully for quite a while at that stage and sometimes, I was lucky enough to be freed from the grip of rumination about work, the purchase of a new phone, whatever my latest top 10 worries were, long enough to be present to what was around me as much as what was going on inside me.
It was on one such bright, crystalline, dew-shine morning in spring that I rounded the corner onto the second long stretch of the lane to discover that the Hawthorns all down the right-hand side of the lane had been cut. The ones that ran along the small river. I was shell-shocked at first. I had taken for granted that they would be there, ready to complete the tunnel of white blossoms in May that made it feel like you were walking down a celebratory aisle. I couldn't understand, didn't they know that the roots of the trees helped with the overflowing river? Didn't they care that the beautiful wild balanced distribution of trees down the lane had been broken? Then to see the bases of the trees, slashed and exploded open, a fireworks burst of splintered innards.
I bawled crying. I absolutely sobbed. The heaving, pushing something out kind of crying, whole chest, waves like the inverse of laughter. And I had to keep walking past them, for days more, because the walk was my twice daily ritual. The release valve for work, the cleanser of morning anxieties, inspirer of soothing song fragments, receptacle of anguished voice notes.
At some point around this time, I decided to test Thay's theory. I spoke to the Alder on the corner, who had, at the time, these beautiful long arms reaching out to the sky like someone rejoicing with their whole being. I saw, in response, an image of the Alder rippling in every direction as if down a latticed hall of mirrors. I understood that the Hawthorns could not be destroyed, they were always there and would always be there. Their existence was not predicated on their physically being there now. On some more essential level, they always were and they always would be, in every direction.
It gave me comfort and over time, the frozenness of my perspective thawed. Many of the Hawthorns grew back, some reseeded. There are two small ones growing in my back garden as I type, some 12 or 13 years after this exchange. For who I was at the time, the cutting of the Hawthorns - their 'death' - was a permanent, new, awful reality to me and I railed against it. What I didn't see yet was the great surging power of the Hawthorn. The great network of global Hawthorns, who wouldn't flinch at the pushing back of their freely-given outflowing into the world, would keep on and come again. The frame of my perception, limited by my comparatively short lifespan and my poor traumatised nervous system that had been conditioned to stay stuck in a sort of never-ending, somewhat numbly discontinuous now, couldn't really feel that the terrible blow was a temporary setback.
So I kept on communicating. Stopping to stand with the Willows, hand on cool bark, wondering if I would receive a response, sometimes yes, sometimes no... I'd guess now that the 'no' was just presence, but my mind at the time (it's not so terribly different now, but some), would have only wanted to receive something knowable. Truth in the embodied, felt sense, was still a little ways away from me at that stage. I responded to the trees on the lane with sympathy when I saw further agricultural wounds, stopping to hold a leaf gently and wonder what they might want. I wondered about calling tree surgeons, because, logical brain, but often, I would just feel to do something, like carry a broken piece to the lake. So I would comply. Or I would leave a favourite stone or gem, like a little beacon of solidarity and care, a gift from me to the tree, as if it might somehow be an encouragement. Or some of the flower heads I would collect from the pavement outside the corner pub at the start of the walk.
I made a lot of tiny altars of gratitude to the beauty of the lane. What strikes me now was that my attention and presence and care was the gift, the actions made it tangible, but it was the relational stance that gave it substance and meaning. What really surprised me by all of this was the ways that it became reciprocal. I walked the lane for years. So I had amassed quite a lot of moments like the ones above, like replanting a bunch of Marsh Marigold, those beautiful yellow, early spring flowers. Someone had torn up the ditch and they were left in a clod of dirt, roots exposed, on the tarmac. I'm not a gardener and I find cold sodden soil, animated with wiggly-bois, a sensory trip, but I dug with my hands and lifted them and replanted them and walked home with wet knees and hands cacked with muck. Every spring I see them return, I don't necessarily revisit the memory, but the feeling of relationship, of reciprocity is there. One time, on a really rough shamanic journey where my mind was absolutely gripped with the undermining mantra of 'I can't trust myself, I can't do this, I'm just imagining it, I'm no good at this', they appeared, unbidden, mid-self-hate-spin-cycle, and I understood that whenever I felt scared on a journey, like I couldn't do it, or was 'letting my mind get in the way', I could call on them and they would come and grow in that scared place and transform the fear. It was such a beautiful experience, to see them, just appear, with no conscious thought of them, but as if they had been biding their time, looking for an opportunity to repay my love with theirs.
I promised a few posts back that I would explain the willow staff, and I will, but I think that's for a separate post now. So I will go and edit this and continue on with my lane reminiscences soon.
I am genuinely curious about other people's nature relationships, I know I'm not alone in that feeling of recognition and delight at meeting a returning flower friend, or seeing an Oak sapling recover from storm damage and turn the breakage into something that works.
