Trees

It’s January of a new year – 2023. I’m sure I’m just one of many people hoping the 2020s continue to improve. May there be less disease, less violence, less hunger and injustice. May there be more listening, more compassion, justice and kindness.

I am reading a remarkable book: To Speak for the Trees, by Diana Beresford-Kroger. She is both a brilliant scientist and a wise woman in the real sense of someone who is the repository of sacred knowledge that has been gathered over centuries. She is originally from a part of Ireland that I visited last year (County Kerry, and over the border into County Cork, all of it the southwest corner of Ireland) but now she lives in Canada. She is both sharing ancient Celtic wisdom and speaking for the trees.

I’m just a little way into her book, but already she has me thinking of a grove of aspen trees along the coastal trail in Anchorage, in the heart of Earthquake Park. After the bench, which marks for me the last edge of our old property, where it slid to meet the inlet, you walk around another corner as you head west on the trail (away from the city) and then you find yourself surrounded by giant (for this part of Alaska!) trees, a whole grove of them rising up on both sides of the trail, their skin so smooth and their branches touching far up above since they are standing close enough to touch each other. And I can vividly picture how their root systems are intertwined under the trail, under the earth that I am standing on. And this is how they communicate with each other. Trees actually talking to other trees. Was it Diana Beresford-Kroger who wrote about how stands of aspen are actually one organism because of how completely linked they are under the soil?

Anyway, the feeling I always get there is of being in a cathedral. A sacred space, but it’s an alive and breathing place.

Wishing any reader who hits on this many blessings in the new year.