I found the first few weeks at my childhood home in
Pennsylvania to be a period of adaptation. Initially I felt quite disoriented
and out of sorts. All of my usual routines and habits were either gone or rearranged.
I was in a lush, three-dimensional landscape after years on the flat, dry
plains of eastern Colorado. I was in a densely populated and built-out state
after years surrounded by empty and wide-open spaces. And I was surrounded by
people after living a semi-eremitic lifestyle for six years. On top of that, I
was again immersed in the sleepy, hypnotic energy of the land that birthed me,
after a twenty-four year absence. And
I no longer had any grounded, physical work to do, not even a garden or critters
to tend to.
It was too much change too fast and it agitated me
at first, but I did at least recognize my agitation was only a symptom of the
true malaise—being forced to confront that frightening thing called emptiness.
And I knew from past experience that into emptiness something will always flow.
So I waited to see what would present itself.
The first thing seemed innocent enough. It was just
the thought that, hey, here in this lush abundant place I might want to really
get to know all of the wild herbs growing here. I’ve been interested in
herbalism since my college days (when I grew a few potted herbs and loved to
take walks in fields full of yarrow and tansy and goldenrod, and to pick wild
strawberries that grew in some of Penn State’s gorgeous pastures). Later, in
Colorado I discovered that in order to feel I belonged to my particular spot on
earth, I had to get to know the plants that grew there. When most of the plants
were foreign to me I felt like I was a stranger in a strange land. To address
that, in the last few years in Colorado I had begun to get to know some of the
plants that had previously been strangers to me. My part of Colorado was high
desert, however, and its biodiversity was paltry compared to that of
Pennsylvania, so Pennsylvania presented the perfect opportunity for me to take
my plant knowledge to a new level.
The abandoned pasture next to my parent’s property
was the perfect place to start. It was about halfway through the process of
succeeding from well-cropped pasture back to forest again. There had always
been a fair amount of trees in there, but now the open places were sprinkled
with young spruces and some other trees. The bulk of the pasture was a tangled
mass of raspberry and blackberry thickets and huge stands of wild roses. I
began to take forays in there and to learn to identify the plants. Some I
already knew from childhood: poison ivy, black locust, sassafras, queen anne’s
lace, daisies, self-heal, goldenrod, clover, buttercups, wood sorrel,
black-eyed susans, and so on. But many I had never learned to identify: ironweed,
Joe-Pye weed, boneset, St. John’s wort, lobelia, dogbane, crown vetch,
pinkweed, virgin’s bower, pokeweed, etc. As summer progressed the list of
plants I could identify grew longer and longer. And of course I didn’t confine
myself to that one small pasture. I was roaming all over the place and
discovering new plants in need of identification everywhere I went.
By acting on this one little inkling to get to know
the plants, I immediately began to ground myself. My sense of agitation faded
away because I had something important to do, something physical that connected
me with my environment.
But not only did I study plants, I also nibbled on
plants, rubbed myself with plants (poison ivy—inadvertently--and
jewelweed--intentionally), sniffed plants, got stung by plants (nettles), dug
roots (burdock), made twine out of plants (dogbane), hung plants in the attic
to dry, made tea out of plants, cooked with plants, fermented plants, snoozed
on top of plants, climbed trees, swung from vines, and more or less interacted
with plants in every way imaginable.
Plants also began visiting me in my dreams and
communicating with me. Poison ivy was one such visitor—a very gentle, feminine
being who apparently plays some sort of caretaking role in the forest. Poison
ivy was everywhere I went, covering the ground at the forest edges and vining
up trees. I noticed that although she
twined up many trees, the thickest and most ancient vines seemed to be on the
black locust trees. Perhaps it was because locust trees are legumes and fix
atmospheric nitrogen—maybe she chose to parasitize the locusts in order to get
that “fix” of nitrogen. But staring one day at the gorgeous vines, with their
thousands upon thousands of aerial root hairs digging into the warm brown bark
of a black locust tree, a flash of insight came to me. She wasn’t a parasite.
These two species were linked up intentionally and symbiotically. The thing
they were sharing, however, will never be measured by science—they were linking
consciousness.
I got the sense of the consciousness of the forest
and plants in other ways too. On my walks up the back road I would often pause
to look at a huge dying maple tree, its trunk emerging from the forest floor
twenty feet below me and its canopy towering high above me. I remember this
tree from childhood and loved it then too, but in childhood I had never noticed
a peculiar thing that happened when I was in its presence. Here is what I wrote
in my journal the first time I noticed it:
The other experience was two nights ago on a walk up the road. It was a gorgeous evening and there was an amazing quality to the sunlight. A doe passed twenty feet from me without noticing me. As I continued up the road I stopped here and there to admire specific trees, particularly the very old specimens (fortunately no one has logged this part of the woods). I stood for awhile admiring one huge tree growing from the forest floor below me and towering high above me.
I stood there just in awe, taking its presence in, then finally started walking up the road again. But I only got a few steps before I realized—my hands were just buzzing with energy! I felt such power coursing through me, but especially through my hands. What’s this? All of a sudden it hit me—it was the tree. I went back and felt the power moving through me, and something immense, and an emotion like the deepest grief or beauty or love. And the sense of dignity and wisdom and deep, aching memory.
And some inkling I can’t yet put into words—about the earth under the tree, and the sky, and the tree being a tower of water, pulling earth energies up to meet the sky. And where I stood I was in this powerful force-field created by that linking of elements. And the tree was not a mere conduit but a conscious being, and the linking of earth below and sky above was an exchange of information. And the tree was an individual, but not only—it was much more this something bigger, this greater field.
I continued to have this experience every time I passed
the tree. At first I tried to find a rational explanation. The road began to
steepen significantly shortly before I passed the tree. I thought perhaps the
buzzing in my hands was just due to increased circulation because my heart had
to pump harder to power up the hill. But I easily disproved that, because my
hands would buzz even on the downhill journey and they would buzz when I was
just hanging out in that general area and happened too close to the tree, and
they would buzz when I moseyed and ambled my way slowly up the hill without
getting my heart rate up. In the end I gave up trying to be rational about it
and moved into that other, nonlinear way of being and perceiving, letting it
become part of the myth and story of the land that was beginning to unfold for me.
I spent considerable time with that tree, sometimes
clambering down the road bank to hug and sit with it (and get eaten alive by
mosquitoes down there). Besides the feeling I had of being in a powerful
force-field when I was near it, my other strong feeling was that this maple
tree (and I believe all maple trees) really
love human beings and feel protective and parental towards us. This was totally
counterintuitive for me. We’re an awful species, we have utterly no respect for
any part of the natural world, so how could any tree (or any living thing for
that matter), feel love or regard for our species? In my mind, the plant and
animal kingdoms should prefer us gone from this planet, and good riddance!
I also thought I sensed
a lot of sadness and that we’ve been missed, because we no longer choose to
have relationships with the maple trees. It seems they want to link consciousness with us, and like the poison ivy and the
black locust tree, the sum of that connection would be greater than the parts.
