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The Sentience of Trees

9/29/2024

What is it about trees that captivate us? We are drawn to them, inspired by them, feel an innate kinship with them that is hardly ever explained to us by our typical western institutions and schools. Yet we feel their energy, their sentience and their spirit.

I was hiking with a friend near Alsea falls the other day. There are Douglas fir and western red cedar there that are huge, ancient, some at least 400 years old. The love and wisdom emanating from them was so powerful. We would end up just standing still on the trail for quite awhile in awe and communion with them. As we did that we could feel their energy reaching out to us, and see that sometimes they created faces that would form in the bark to speak to us on a level we could relate to as humans.

I could see little paths coming from the main trail leading a short way to several giant firs where people have been called to go to them to stand next to them, greet them, and most likely hug them. Trees really like that, especially if we ask them if we may first.

Not long before I went on this hike, a friend sent me a video about a trend on TikTok, which I am not subscribed to so didn’t know about, where people film themselves talking to trees. They ask the tree to touch their shoulder and the trees do just that. The experience recorded is emotional and sometimes transcendent. And people are moved to say thank you to the tree.

So many young people today have grown up immersed in technology and a digital world. I have felt like maybe that replaces playing outdoors and they miss out on being in the energy of Nature, and getting to know the trees, the wind, the wild beings that are our neighbors. But now seeing people blending digital technology and Nature, and interacting with trees and recognizing them as sentient beings, well it gives me great hope.

I remember many specific trees in my life as friends and landmarks for feelings and memories. All the trees in my childhood yard and in the neighborhood had distinct personalities. Some, like the maple we climbed in our front yard, were easy to play with and welcoming. But the maple tree in our back yard always felt prickly, and even though we tried to interact with it by hanging a tire swing from a low branch, it felt uninterested in us so we didn’t spend much time there. The huge weeping willow next door felt like a sacred place to me and I always felt her Goddess-mother energy surround me as I entered her space. These relationships and feelings were a foundation for my life and how I felt and saw the world.

My dad was a botanist and naturalist, and I know he loved trees, and probably knew them deeply as friends. But did he ever tell me that they are wise elders? Maybe. I’m pretty sure he didn’t tell me that some would speak to me, give me advice, hug me and love me. I would find that out on my own.

Did I ever tell my daughter? I’m sure I did, but to what extent? When she was young we would often visit a very old cottonwood by our house that we called Grandfather. Did he become a landmark tree friend in her memories? She’s grown now, but we still share a love of trees and I think I will share the video with her. Then we can talk about tree friends and kin we have known, and she probably has some of her own tree stories to share.

Alsea Falls trail - photo by Gayle Mair

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The Deva of Blackberries

8/29/2024

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Earlier this summer my landlord came over to repair a gate. He looked over at the fence that borders an easement between our yard and the neighbors’ yard beside us. There is a gap of about 3 feet between their fence and ours and in between them is a thick tangle of blackberry canes. He remarked that they had grown up a lot this year, and thought that both we and the neighbors had a joint responsibility for managing them. He recommended that I trim them back from our side of the fence as best as I could this summer. I told them that I would, after they were done flowering as they were feeding so many bees right now.

After the flowering, I watched the tight green nodules form and very slowly ripen throughout the summer into plump juicy berries the color of midnight. How could I cut them without letting them bear the sweet fruit that would feed me and the birds?

It is a wonderful feeling to step outside in the morning and pick berries for breakfast and I marvel at their hardy proliferation. Their lifeforce is both sweet and painful as I get poked a lot trying to reach the biggest ones just winking at me an arms length inside the tangle. A stalwart young ash tree is growing in the middle of them. This morning I asked the ash, “How are you doing in there?”

The reply I got back was a feeling of attentive resoluteness, like a favorite auntie watching over an unruly pack of children.

Some people see blackberry as a big problem. Especially if they want to grow gardens, orchards, lawns and just have space that is not thorny. Once established, it is very hard to remove as its vines easily hide underground and pop up out of the earth so fast you can almost watch them if you had time to sit and look. It is considered an invasive species and if left alone, will spread quickly and take over.

I know people who have spent untold hours of hard labor and cash to burn out the roots to take back space for gardens and orchards. And I know people who find ways to coexist, and have allowed them to grow in certain areas as hedges for sweet summer harvests.

Here I am in the middle, caretaker for the yard, but also for the pollinators. And friend to the fae. When I first moved in here, I was told by the fae that the easement between our fences was the territory of the wild fae and nature spirits who wanted to be left alone. You can read more about that story I wrote last September about when I stepped on some Faerie toes. Before I do anything in their territory, I promised to talk to them about it first.

I tuned into the deva of blackberry to get to know them better. I was surprised at the feeling of gentleness that greeted me. She says it’s why she has to be so tough and thorny. If she didn’t have that toughness, she is so gentle that she would not be able to do her job. Her job is thriving and nurturing. She says it may not look like it from our view, but she creates space for others to thrive. She takes me down into the soil with microorganisms and fungi and seeds that sprout up as green shoots between the canes. She shows me small creatures that live protected by the thorny tangle. She resonates with thriving and abundance, nurturance and standing one’s ground. As for being regarded as an invasive species, she says that is a very human centric point of view. There are no invasive species as far as Nature is concerned.

I pondered that and how I have so much to learn as a human, as a caretaker of the space I share with many beings. So I will find a way for the blackberries to continue to be a part of the ecosystem here and do their job. And I will talk to the wild fae and let them know I have to trim the canes this winter to keep them from running the fence over and from climbing up the crabapple tree in the yard. I trust that communication will be beneficial, and that we will all find our balance in the Divine intelligence of Nature.

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Being in This Time of Letting Go

7/30/2024

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We are in the midst of an unraveling and a quickening. This is happening on a collective level as institutions are crumbling and the ways things have been done for centuries are becoming redundant and unsustainable. The more these are propped up, the more energy and time are wasted. New ideas, communities and technologies are coming forward to help humanity evolve our consciousness. I have great hope that these will help us to be more in resonance and reverence with each other and all the other beings on the earth.

This is of course being mirrored in our own personal lives through our relationships with others and ourselves.

When we cling too tightly to the things that we have, we are not getting the chance to grow and evolve. We can be fixed on our attachment to our material possessions, to the relationships that we have emotionally invested in, and the structure and format of how we do things. Everything is energy, and when our energy is holding or feeding something that does not give us joy or lightness, it can give us the feeling of being stuck or weighed down.

I am feeling like it is more important than ever for us on the spiritual path to frequently go through material things and to pass on to others those items which we no longer use. There are many things we keep that have a sentimental value to us, but that no longer resonate with the energy of who we are. This could be something like a family heirloom that no one else in the family seems to want. We might feel obligated to hold on to it even though it doesn’t give us joy. We then have to decide how and when we can let it go. It is a lot easier to clean out our closets and give away things we haven’t worn in two years! And that’s hard enough for some people, myself included sometimes.

But moving on to bigger things, how do we let go of relationships, and other things that have a more spiritual manifestation? This is when we need to turn to our tools and ceremonies to help us.

When a relationship or friendship ends or starts to fade, we have to come to terms with that and accept that it is okay. We all have different paths we are being called to follow. Sometimes after our paths diverge we can still keep a fondness and fluid freedom that lets us remain in occasional contact with the other person. We reach out to one another when we feel called to, with no obligation or feeling we should. And sometimes with others, we know we just need to let them go and not look back.

But for other relationships, maybe ones that have involved a bigger emotional charge or entanglement, we may have a harder time untangling our energy with that other person. There are etheric cords to unattach. Many times they dissolve naturally as we no longer give energy to the relationship. But there are times when we have to take an active approach and ask our spirit team to help remove and resolve the cords for us and make repairs so we are not leaking energy from our auric field.

How do we know if we have cords to be cut? We might keep thinking about the other person, or they might keep showing up in our dreams at night. But the best way to know is just to ask your spirit team if you have cords between you and that person and if so, ask them to tend to them. We may also want to look at creating a ceremony to help us energetically release that other person to their perfect path.

This also happens with other situations in our personal lives. If we have a group or circle that we have either been attending or facilitating, how do we know if it has outlived its usefulness? Maybe its original intent was to bring together community. If it has done that and your community is close in other ways now, maybe that circle can end or evolve into something else. Sometimes we have to ask our team to disconnect our energy from these as well, similar to cord cutting.

Looking within, we turn to see those inner things which we need to shed to evolve spiritually. These are the limiting beliefs, thought patterns and habits that have layered upon us over the years. Some of these may have been woven into us at an early age and we have been trying to shed them since then. As we do our spiritual work, we find that we can peel some of these off in layers but that it may take a bigger shift in our consciousness to unravel them enough so they are not holding us back from our authentic self.

When we decide we are going to resolve a limiting belief or pattern, we have to use all our tools. We have to stalk and track where these came from and pay attention to how they have manifested in our lives. Awareness creates the corral for that which is not part of our authentic self. We have to do the ancestral healing as many of these patterns have been passed down through generations. There is also an energetic bond similar to a cord which we have to ask our Spirit team of helpers to help us with as we make the statement aloud that we disconnect from that pattern. There are many more tools and tending techniques, but these are the big ones I have found most useful in my own work with releasing patterns.

Our energy is rapidly shifting as we evolve our consciousness. Because of the Divine principle “as within, so without”, as we release and let go with grace and kindness towards ourselves and others, we are helping the transformative shift that is happening globally. We are doulas helping to birth both our authentic Spirit selves and the higher authentic awakening collective consciousness.

Like birth, it’s messy at times. We may hold on to some things and situations that we know we need to release for far longer than is beneficial for us. But we can make a start and use our intention and our tools to move the energy that we need to shift. And know that we are transforming so much more than just ourselves.

Rose petals scattered on the Willamette River at dusk

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