If Trees Could Talk, page 2
And this was a very important part of the journey of creating this book: building a relationship with the trees. While I’ve always loved trees for their beauty — as a child, I absolutely loved eating broccoli because I thought it looked like little green trees — I began to connect with them on a much deeper level, as individuals. I learned to think of them in the way I think of the different people in my life, and I started to feel like I knew them.
This wasn’t an easy process, though. Just because I was given a very clear topic for the book doesn’t mean that collecting the stories was a walk in the park (pun absolutely intended). Instead, it triggered all of my insecurities. Though I’ve been talking to trees since 2015, and I’ve been channeling spirit guides since the year before that, this book stretched me out of my comfort zone and forced me to grow both as a person and as a channel. Channeling is how I can best describe the method I used to collect these stories: it involves opening up a connection or line of communication, often to unseen or nonphysical beings such as spirit guides, angels, or ascended masters. You can channel your Higher Self, and you can also channel Nature spirits, such as the spirits of the trees who shared their stories in this book.
This book became a personal lesson in I am good enough, something that I’ve struggled with my entire life. It’s the theme that keeps coming up over and over when I do mindset work with myself to my clear fears, blocks, and limiting beliefs. I believe it’s one of the main topics that my soul chose to work on, develop, and clear in this lifetime. It’s one of the primary subjects in my personal school of life.
It didn’t help that the stories weren’t what I had expected: I thought I would receive a series of quaint and magical fairy tales, and what I actually got was very different…so much so that I worried that the stories might be a little too serious. I also struggled with the fear that my channeling skills weren’t good enough for me to receive the full tales, but rather only a superficial version of them…and that there was actually much more underneath the surface than I was able to tap into. The Newlands Corner Yew had given me a very serious task, and I wanted to do justice to the trees’ project. And to do so, I needed to believe that I was good enough to make it happen.
1
Where I’m Coming From
Before we delve into the stories of the trees, I thought it might be useful for you to get an idea of where I’m coming from. The previous chapter probably left you with a series of questions: How is it that trees can talk? How do I hear them? How is this possible? Is this for real? When I first became familiar with the idea of tree communication, I had a lot of questions, and it wasn’t until I experienced it for myself that I learned how it all worked…at least, how it worked for me. I’m sure everyone who talks to trees has their own way of going about it.
Here’s how I see the world: everything has a spirit. Not just people, but also animals, plants, and minerals. The official term for this belief is animism, and it is common in many pagan belief systems, including those of many indigenous peoples. It’s a way of being that makes me feel very connected to everything around me, particularly the elements of Nature and the members of the plant, animal, and mineral realms.
This means that when I’m talking to a tree, I’m not talking to its bark or its branches, or its leaves — I’m actually communicating with its spirit. This is the same as the way that we do not talk to the skin, the limbs, or the hair of another human being — we communicate with their spirit, their soul, the energy that brings their body to life. Sometimes I’ll speak out loud to a tree, but most of the time I’m “speaking” with my mind: sending silent thoughts of communication directly to the tree spirit. And when I “hear” the tree responding to me, what I hear is their words flowing into my mind. It’s a kind of silent, telepathic communication.
For the purposes of this book, I channeled the trees’ stories directly. This means that I used myself as a verbal channel to receive and speak the trees’ stories out loud into my phone, which I then had transcribed for this book. When I do this, it’s as though my own consciousness moves to the back of my mind and the tree’s spirit takes the driver’s seat. I’m still there, but I’m a passive observer in the background: watching, listening, but not interfering. I felt that this would be a much more straightforward way of capturing the trees’ messages and, even more importantly, the essence and the energy of their stories. It was also much easier to speak their words than to write them down directly, as I would have struggled to keep up the pace with their messages, which were often passionate and ranting. Finally, it allowed me to truly feel the energy of each tree as it was speaking through me — an experience that was often exhilarating and deeply moving.
For some readers, who are familiar with the concept of channeling, this will all seem perfectly normal. For others — perhaps for most readers — it might be a stretch outside their current belief system. If this is the case for you, I would like to encourage you to open your mind to the possibility that trees can talk. Wherever you are on the spectrum of belief, if you keep an open mind, I assure you that you’ll get something out of this book. If this is too much of a stretch for you to believe, then I suggest that you simply take this book as a work of fiction, not nonfiction, and in this way you can still get the value from the stories of the trees.
In any case, I invite you to set aside any judgment you might be feeling. If we allow our inner critic to take a back seat, as my mind does when I’m channeling, we open up space for new things that are waiting to be discovered by us. And in turn, we expand our awareness to include new worlds of possibilities.
As you read this book, you’ll notice that I refer to certain trees as “he” or “she.” When I first started talking to trees, I always heard a male voice in my head. Each tree seemed to have a different voice, much like different human beings do, but they were all male. Eventually, I began to make contact with trees that had a female voice, such as a holly tree that I connected with during a plant spirit initiation ceremony guided by my friend Suneet.
In this book, the vast majority of the trees had male voices, with the most notable exceptions being The Grandmothers, The Three Witches, and the Savernake Queen Oak. I’m not sure why this is, and I’m not sure if it’s even important whether the voices are male or female. In any case, speaking from a botanical perspective, most trees and plants that will be familiar to the home gardener or the woodland walker are what’s known as “monoecious,” which means that a single plant or tree bears both male and female flowers. Beeches, oaks, and sycamores, for example, are monoecious, with both male and female flowers occurring on the same tree.
Other types of trees and plants are called “dioecious,” which means that some trees produce male flowers, and other individuals produce female flowers. Hollies, for example, are dioecious, and you may notice when you’re out for a walk during autumn and winter when the hollies are fruiting that only some will be adorned with red berries, while others will be barren. The berry-producing trees are the females — only female plants are able to set fruit and produce berries — and the plain green hollies are (probably) the males. If you pay attention when you’re outdoors in areas where hollies tend to grow, you may see many more fruitless hollies than you will see fruit-bearing ones. This might be because there are more males along the trails that you’re walking, or it may mean the exact opposite: that there aren’t any male hollies in the area, as you need males and females near each other (within about 200 yards) so that the females can produce berries.
To give you another example, yews are mostly dioecious, but occasionally can be monoecious, and they can even change sex with time. The famous Fortingall Yew in Scotland, believed to be one of the oldest trees in Europe, recently surprised the world by appearing to change sex when it began producing red arils —the particular type of fruit this tree produces — on its upper branches. The yew had been male for as long as anyone could remember — the tree is thought to be at least 2,000 to 3,000 years old, though some estimate its age at 5,000 years — and it suddenly began behaving as though it were female.
Botany lessons aside, I don’t think it really matters whether the tree spirits speak to me in a male or a female voice, and I don’t think it’s worth reading anything more into this. That’s simply how I perceived the voices of the trees that chose to participate in this book. Perhaps we hear the voices that we need to hear, in the way that we need to hear them.
The important thing, as I see it, is that trees — whether male, female, or bisexual/hermaphroditic — have a much broader perspective on life than we humans do. Trees can live hundreds — even thousands — of years, compared to people, who for the most part don’t live past the age of ninety or one hundred. As healthcare improves, our lives are lengthened, but our time on Earth is still very, very short compared to the lives of the trees. This, combined with the vast communication network that trees have, which you’ll hear about in future chapters, means that trees have access to thousands and thousands of years of wisdom that we’re able to tap into.
Nature is generally defined as the phenomena of the collective physical world on our planet, including the elements of the plant realm, the animal realm, and the mineral realm. It refers to the Earth’s resources and to the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. It concerns the features of the Earth, rather than things that have been created by humans. Because Nature is deeply sacred to me, I have chosen to reject conventional grammatical advice, and you will see that I capitalize the word “Nature” throughout this book. This was a conscious decision, made to emphasize the importance of Nature in my life, and in all our lives.
My own relationship with Nature has evolved greatly over the course of my life. My father and my grandmother were avid gardeners, and they were probably responsible for planting the seed of my love for Nature. When I was fourteen years old, my parents gave me a patch of dirt in the front yard for me to start my own garden. My dad took me down to a local garden center called Mountaire Garden Supply where Virginia, the owner’s daughter, helped me to plan out my garden. One year later, when I was ready to look for my first job, it was she who hired me. For a young lover of Nature, this was the perfect job, and I learned so much about gardening and ornamental plants.
At the same time, I developed a great interest in walking and hiking. I lived just down the street from the Mt. Diablo State Park in Clayton, California, which is located across the bay from San Francisco. It was no more than ten minutes on foot from my house, which meant that I spent many a scorching hot summer afternoon exploring the trails with my friends, who were surprisingly willing to be dragged up the mountain by me. When I went to university, my passion for hiking and exploring sadly waned, which was especially unfortunate considering that the hills surrounding San Luis Obispo were filled with gorgeous places to walk. However, my passion for gardening was rekindled each summer when I returned to work at Mountaire.
From there, I spent many years in Latin America. I lived for several years on the coast in southeast Mexico, where I cultivated tropical plants in my spare time, of which I didn’t have much. I lived in the jungle, surrounded by lush Nature, but I didn’t really have the time to take advantage of it, aside from admiring its beauty every day. After living in Argentina, and spending much time in Chile, I moved to London, then to the Surrey Hills, an area rich in public footpaths and emerald green forests. Surrey is the most wooded county in England, which means that I have had an abundance of trails to explore under the shade of trees.
I began exploring the local trails on a regular basis, and I eventually ventured out on some of the longer National Trails, experiences which I shared in my books on the South Downs Way and The Ridgeway. I was walking, walking, walking through the woods, but I wasn’t really connecting with Nature. At the same time, I was beginning to feel that I needed to expand my spiritual awareness to include the natural world. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, or what a Nature-based spiritual system might look like for me, until I eventually discovered OBOD — The Order of Bards, Ovates & Druids — and began my spiritual journey by signing up for the Bardic Grade training course, which finally gave me the words to express the things I’d been feeling when I was out in Nature. It opened me up to a whole new way of connecting with the woods and the natural elements.
Finally, I want to mention the idea that Nature can be a mirror: a place that reflects back to us the things we need to see in ourselves. It can trigger the stuff that we need to bring to light so we can work on it in our personal development (things such as my lesson of I am good enough). It can also provide a space for deep healing. That’s one of the many lessons that I received in this year of collecting tree stories, and as you’ll soon see, their tales give us the opportunity to better connect with ourselves and get to know our true selves by connecting with Nature.
By now, you should have a pretty good idea of what this book is all about, and the journey you’re about to join me on. To further clarify, this book is for you if:
You love Nature and the outdoors
You feel like there’s something more to life, but you don’t know what that is
You’re feeling disconnected from yourself, like your life has somehow gotten off track
You feel like you don’t really know who you are anymore…or maybe you’ve never truly known yourself at all
Life is going just fine, but you have the suspicion that things could be much better
You live your life in front of a computer screen or glued to your phone, and you’re ready for something different
Throughout this book, you’ll follow me on my journey as I connect on a deeper level with the trees, building relationships with them as the year goes by. You’ll hear their stories, and you’ll be given a series of experiments to carry out, should you choose to do so. These will help you to connect with yourself through connecting with Nature, and they’ll open you up to the deep wisdom and healing that the trees can offer us. They will assist you in getting out of your head and into your body, so you can feel more deeply and truly experience all the joy that life has to offer. They’ll add a new level of richness to your life that you may have never thought possible. I invite you to join me on my journey of collecting the trees’ stories.
2
How to Use this Book
How you use this book is entirely up to you, and you alone will know the best way for you to work through the chapters based on what’s right for you. I’m not here to teach you anything; on the contrary, it’s the trees who are the teachers in this book. I’m here to share my journey and my experience with the trees with you, and to facilitate your own personal growth by making the stories of the trees more readily available to you. You’re the one who is actually going to do the work, should you choose to do so. Be sure to tailor this to fit your own personal wants and needs.
Now seems the appropriate time to share a confession with you: I’m not an expert in all this. Instead, I’m going down this path along with you. I may be one or more steps ahead of you on this journey, I may be walking alongside you, or I may even be walking behind you. We’re all at different places on our path, moving along at our own pace.
Remember: in this book, as in life, only you know what’s best for you. Take any advice you receive with a grain of salt, including the suggestions in this book. Take what serves you; leave what doesn’t. Likewise, some of what’s shared in this book will resonate with you, some of it may not. See what feels right to you and go from there. Some topics may require a stretch outside of your comfort zone; others may require you to expand your current belief system. You do you.
This book chronicles my experience throughout 2018 as I received and documented the stories of 28 trees. You can choose to read each chapter in order and experience the adventure and the stories as I did, in chronological order. If I were going to read this book, that’s probably what I’d do, simply to get a feel for what the journey was like for the author.
You can also dip in and out as you like. You might want to open the book at a random point and read the chapter that you open up to. I’ve done that before with certain books, and I’ve often found that I “coincidentally” opened up the book to precisely the chapter that I needed to read at that time because it provided guidance or information on an issue or a topic that had been on my mind.
Or you could pick one species of tree and read through all the oak stories, then all the yew stories, then the sycamore stories. You might start with your favorite species of tree and then go from there. Or you might simply read through the table of contents and pick whichever chapter stands out to you or has a kind of zingy feeling to it.
One thing I need to mention: you may notice that the trees have a very peculiar way of telling their tales. There’s a lot of repetition of words, phrases, and concepts. At times it almost feels like they’re chanting a mantra. Again and again, as I was receiving the stories of the trees, I got the feeling that they think we humans need to hear something several times before it actually sinks in, and they’re probably right. This means that you may find yourself reading and re-reading certain chapters and picking up on different details each time. I know that I have books that I’ve read and re-read and marked up with a different color pen each time, underlining different passages with each reading.
The trees’ stories often include suggestions of activities for you to try: new ways of doing things, new actions to take, or new ways of looking at things. You might want to read the entire book first, and then go back and do some (or all) of the activities, or you might want to read each chapter and do the activity before moving onto the next chapter. Or, as I recommended earlier, you might open the book at random, then read the chapter and do the corresponding activity wherever you’ve opened up the book.
