If Trees Could Talk, page 15
I always have a little rubbish bag in my backpack, though to be honest I rarely use it. There are certain trails or spots that I know to be full of litter — such as the little grove where The Grandmothers stand — and I will go to those places and collect trash, but I rarely pull out my bag as I walk to pick things up. Because I walk with poles, it’s a bit cumbersome to carry a pole in each hand and also lug around a bag of trash. But I can, of course, walk perfectly fine without poles, and it’s easy for me to fold them up and put them in my pack when I walk through an area that’s littered with bottles or plastic.
This is about making a little extra effort. Picking up bottles will not ruin a beautiful day’s walk. On the contrary: when I do pick up rubbish, it makes me feel better about taking action to clean up the trails and woodlands that I so cherish.
How about you? Do you carry a bag around with you when you go out into Nature? Do you ever pick up trash that other people have left behind?
So often we adopt the attitude that it’s not our rubbish, so it’s not our responsibility — and yet it doesn’t take much effort on our part to clean up the woods. Are you willing to help? If so, what are you willing to do?
19
Savernake Queen Oak
As I continued my search for the King and Queen, I passed by a young tree with a sign proclaiming that it was the Replacement King Oak. It was a completely unremarkable tree and had it not been for its sign, I would have walked by without noticing it. I later learned that it had been planted in the 1980s to replace the Original King Oak and that it is the progeny of the Savernake Cluster Oak. I was disappointed to see that it was such a young tree, as I had been hoping to see the ancient King Oak, and I paused to see if the Replacement King had a story for me. It did not, so I continued onward toward the Original Queen Oak, who was very easy to find as she was clearly marked on the OS Map. I was grateful to see that she was still alive.
Located just off to the side of the trail, surrounded by a carpet of bracken, the Original Queen Oak is but a remnant of her past greatness. Her trunk is split, and her canopy has long broken off. She’s essentially an ancient, barely living stump with a few small branches. This is a common tactic of English oaks: to extend their lifespan, very old trees of 700-800 years old will shed their broad crown, greatly shortening their height. I imagine that this helps to conserve energy and resources, thus extending their time on this planet. It’s actually a very smart strategy.
The Original Queen Oak is an ancient tree, and her future replacement has already been planted nearby. At first, I was saddened to see her in such bad shape, but my sadness soon faded as I felt her vibrant energy. She was so full of joy that it was impossible to mourn her decaying state, and I can feel myself tap into that sense of bubbly joy every time I re-read her words. I hope that you, too, can get a sense of her cheerful energy.
Do not mourn for me. Do not mourn for me. I am overjoyed to have spent the hundreds and hundreds of years that I have been in this forest. Look at me, you can see how old I am. And look at all the life there is on me: the ferns, the moss, all the living things on the forest floor below me, the fungus on my trunk, nestled amongst my old chunky bark. And look up and see what is left of my own life, tiny little branches. I am so old, and I am so pleased to have been standing here for so long. I am so pleased to have been given the recognition that I have been given: Original Queen Oak. You can see that my king has fallen and there is now a Replacement King Oak.
Everything has a cycle, everything has a lifespan, and mine is coming to an end. I have many years of life left in me, but not as many as I have lived. Now you heard my message, far back on the trail, even before you heard Pointing Oak’s message.
My message, my story for you, is a story of joy because that is what I feel. That is what I feel having been here for so many hundreds of years: the joy of being a tree, the joy of being in this beautiful forest, surrounded by other trees, of other species, other oaks, chestnuts, surrounded by bracken, all the green things. Look at the beautiful blue sky that I have stretched my branches towards for hundreds of years. I feel such great joy to have been here on this Earth, in this place, in the form that I have taken of the majestic Queen Oak that I am. You know I have presence. You know I am beautiful, and you can imagine what I must have looked like a few decades before — perhaps even a hundred years ago.
And so that is what I want to speak to you about: find your joy.
If you want to connect more deeply with Nature, find your joy in Nature. Do you enjoy walking, do you enjoy running, do you enjoy cycling? What is it that you enjoy doing in Nature? Do you enjoy meditating in Nature? Do you enjoy just going to the park and having a cup of coffee or tea? Find your joy outdoors, find your joy with the trees, find your joy with all the living green things, find your joy and do it. Make it happen.
Make it happen on a regular basis: find your joy and do it. Give yourself permission to do the joyful outdoor things, which bring you a deep sense of happiness and connection, not only to the green things but to yourself. Find your joy and feel it, really feel it. And, as I said, give yourself permission to have these experiences, because sometimes people feel guilty. They come to the woods and they think, “I should be doing something else, I should be doing some work, I should be doing something with the family, I should do be doing emails, I should be paying bills.” What they are really saying is: “I should be doing practical things.”
Now, of course, you can bring your family to the woods if you like, but when you find your joy, perhaps it is being alone in the woods, perhaps it is being alone in the park. Whatever your joy is, give yourself permission to do it and make it a priority because it is an important part of you and your experience on this Earth. It will help you to deepen your connection to yourself, it will help deepen your connection to your Higher Self, it will help you deepen your connection to Nature and all the green things, so you find your joy in Nature and you do it: free from guilt. Give yourself permission to do this.
How many trees have talked to you about the importance of slowing down? And perhaps your joy in Nature will be slowing down in Nature? Perhaps your joy will be jogging through Nature, cycling through Nature? There are different times for different things, so do not get this confused with other things that other trees have told you: there is a time for being still in Nature, there is a time for being quiet in Nature, and there is a time for living your joy in Nature and sometimes those things coincide and sometimes they do not. This is important for you to know, this task, this suggestion, this call to action of finding your joy in Nature is different from what other trees have told you. So, please experiment: find your joy.
Now if I were to ask you: what is your joy in Nature, what is your joy in the outdoors? How do you feel joy in the outdoors? What are the first things that come to mind? Write that down and if you think: “oh, I don’t know, I don’t know, how do I know that? That’s such a big thing.” Try. Experiment. Try one thing. Did you feel joy? If not, try another thing. Did you feel joy? If not, try another thing and keep trying, keep experimenting, keep playing, until you find that thing that is your joy in Nature and make it happen on a regular basis and really, really, feel that joy. It is delicious, is it not? Hmmm.
I am nearing the end of what I have to say to you and I am so pleased to have been able to share my story with you, my message for you, my task for you. My life has been full of great joy in this forest, I am so pleased, so pleased with my life. And I hope that you experience the same joy outdoors, in Nature, with the green things. Find your joy and experience it. Thank you.
The joy that emanated from the Savernake Queen Oak was contagious. Whenever I re-read her words, I feel the sense of supreme joy that she expressed through her message. Her story is an important one: lest we take this work of connecting with Nature too seriously, the Queen Oak is here to remind us to find our joy — to get clear on the specific activities that we most enjoy participating in when we’re out in Nature and to just do them.
I think a lot of us — myself included — can take our personal development too seriously. I spend a lot of time identifying my fears, blocks, and limiting beliefs and doing mindset work with myself to shift them. I journal, and I have an extensive morning routine where I do my inner work. I walk my thousand miles every year, and I carefully track my progress toward my goals. It’s all very serious. And while I love every bit of this, it’s not exactly the sense of pure joy that I experienced when I tapped into the message from the Queen Oak.
The energy that I felt when she was giving me her advice was very playful, and I know that I often forget to play when I’m out in Nature, which leads me to wonder: what does Nature play look like for me? My answer: it looks like walking straight through mud puddles rather than gingerly stepping around them; it looks like cracking the thin sheets of ice with the toe of my boot on winter puddles; it looks like searching for new geocaches in the woods. Silly things, nothing really important — but they do bring me joy.
And this is important: our connection with Nature — as well as our personal development work — needs to be joyful. We need to play. We need to find our joy and do it.
How about you? Have you found your joy in Nature? Is it walking, meditating, cycling…or something else? And if you have found your joy, do you actually make it a priority in your life? Do you do it on a regular basis? If not, what can you do to make it happen more often?
If you haven’t found your joy in Nature, what types of outdoor activities are you drawn to doing? What new things do you feel like trying? How would you like to play in the outdoors?
20
Western Hemlock
I was still deep in Savernake Forest, trying to find my way toward the King of Limbs, when I walked past a section of non-native forest. There was a different feeling in this part of the woods: it felt dead and lifeless, despite being filled with seemingly identical evergreen trees, all of them reaching straight up to the sky with perfectly straight trunks. You may remember from Chapter 1 how I feel about plantations of this type. I hurried through this commercial forest as I looked for the trail that would take me to King of Limbs.
The western hemlock, or Tsuga heterophylla, is an evergreen conifer and member of the pine family that is native to the west coast of North America, from Alaska in the north to Sonoma County, California in the south. It’s also known as the western hemlock-spruce. It is commonly planted for timber and wood pulp in Britain, where it stands out in sharp contrast to the native woodland. Western hemlock is valued for its rapid growth, making it well suited for a commercial forest. It was first introduced to Britain in the 19th century and it is now one of the most common conifers found in Britain.
The reason these western hemlock forests always felt so dead and lifeless to me is because they are often very dark and still. These tall, straight, closely planted trees cast a very dense shade, meaning that few plants and wildlife can live beneath them. It’s eerie, which is not exactly the sensation I’m looking for when I enter the woods on my own.
As I hurried through this commercial forest, one of the western hemlocks stopped me in my path with his story, and I reluctantly paused to receive it. I stepped off the main trail, which was so far away from the car park that I no longer worried about someone interrupting me as I channeled the tree’s story, and approached the tree. It had been at least an hour since I had last crossed paths with another walker, and I felt very alone in the woods.
The particular hemlock that called to me was located just off the path, and I stepped right up to his trunk, putting my hands on his bark. I looked around at the sea of apparently identical trees around me. The ground was littered with broken branches, and most of the surrounding hemlocks had bare branches at the lower levels of their trunks, the greenery reserved for the upper boughs. Because the particular hemlock which had spoken to me was right near the trail, it was bare on the forest side and green on the trail side, with long branches that gracefully sloped down toward the path.
The words of this Western Hemlock were humbling, even more so than those of the Pointing Oak. As I mentioned earlier in Chapter 1 when I received the Lone Oak’s story, I have never liked walking through commercial forests: I don’t like the energy of them. Something just feels wrong about this type of woodland. The trees all look the same, planted in straight, unnatural lines.
And yet, as this hemlock reminded me: they are still trees, just like all the others that I clearly have more respect for. After hearing the hemlock’s words, I felt like a tree racist. I had been thinking of certain trees as being more valuable than others, simply because they were native to this land. As someone who has lived in a number of different countries and has spent over half her life as an expat, I was ashamed of my thinking. These trees were immigrants, introduced by foresters, and they were no less valuable or worthy of respect than any of the other trees in the forest. In fact, they served a very specific purpose.
I have something to say. We feel like we are looked down upon. We know that we are not native, we have been planted here. We are not native to this land, but we did not ask to be put here. We are not like other native trees in this wood, which would be allowed to live their full lives until they fall on their own or are struck by lightning, or are felled only because they are a danger to someone who is perhaps walking down the trail. We are here because we will be felled for our timber. You have seen the stacks and stacks of our relatives, trees like us. This is Forestry Commission land. This is what we are here for.
You may think us ugly: our bare trunks, little naked sticks stuck out of them like a skinny porcupine, just a bit of green on the upper top of the tree, and a wasteland down below. Broken branches, piles of needles, dry needles, and far off some baby hemlocks which add a bit of interest perhaps to the woods. We are not here for our beauty, we are not here because we belong here, we are not here because we are native. We are here because we have been planted, and we have a purpose. As long as you humans need timber, as long as you need wood for your furniture, as long as you need paper, as long as you need those things that are made of trees, we will be here, we will be planted. Not us exactly, but others like us. This is our future, this is our purpose. We are here to serve a purpose for your people.
We are very different from the other trees you have talked to. You have mostly been speaking to native British trees and we are not that, we know this. But, rather than feeling the disdain, the disrespect of people as they walk through us, as they walk through this part of the forest that is not made up of native trees, we would like to feel your respect. So, maybe we are not as beautiful as an old oak, or a holly, or a hawthorn, but we are providing a service. We are here to provide a service. We give you things that you use, and we give you things that you need, and we would like respect. And perhaps you can try to see the beauty, you can see the beauty in our service, you can see the beauty in our uniformity, you can see the beauty in the little baby trees that you find here and again underneath the taller trees, perhaps you can find the beauty in this non-native forest. It is not totally devoid of life: if you can hear a bird over there.
Another tree spoke to you earlier of the symphony of the leaves in the wind, and you can hear that now. We also contribute to the symphony. You can hear the rustling of our needles high above. Why then, can you not appreciate our beauty? You can. It is a change of attitude, it is a change of belief, it is a change of perspective. We would like to feel respect as you and others walk through this non-native forest, this commercial forest. The rustling of our needles in the wind, softly, look at our branches up high against the blue sky, we can be so graceful as we softly wave our branches in the breeze.
We are not ugly, we are trees, just like the native trees, and we are here to provide a service. Do not think that we would not prefer to live out a long life, as do the oaks, as do the yews. Do not think that. But this is our lot in life, this is who we are, this is what we are. This is our purpose in life, this is our path, and we have the same tree spirits as the other native trees that you have been speaking to. We are also individuals, although we may look the same to you, we ask that you please, please, look upon us with respect, look upon us as individuals, short-lived individuals, who will be providing a service to you and to other humans. We are here to serve.
And I hope that you will learn to appreciate us, to value us, to respect us. And when you walk through a commercial forest made up of non-native trees, see it as something different, not lesser-than, but different. Pay attention to attitude and how it changes as you walk through the rest of this commercial forest and other commercial forests in the future, we ask please that you do not see us as lesser than, but rather different. And that you see us as individuals and you see the service that we are here to provide for you because that is our role.
Thank you.
What can I say? I think the Western Hemlock said it all, and he said it so perfectly. These non-native trees are here to provide a service for us. They are living beings, just like the native trees that I had been speaking with in every other chapter of this book. And yet, they did not have my respect.
My attitude has changed dramatically since I received this story, and I now look at forest plantations in a very different way. I pause and try to see the trees as individuals, not as carbon copies of each other, no matter how closely each tree resembles its neighbor. I stop to hear the birds that are there, for there is never total silence in a commercial forest.
