I just finished reading a truly heart-awakening book called To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest by Diana Beresford-Kroger, a botanist and medical biochemist from Ireland who was orphaned as a young girl and then raised by her wise Celtic community of relatives and especially her Great-Aunt Nellie. She writes, “We are all woodland people. Like trees, we hold a genetic memory of the past because trees are parents to the child deep within us.” What a lovely notion, to think of ourselves as children of the trees. I’ve been reaching into my long memory and pondering this as I walk through my home forest. I am a child of the forest. The forest is my Ancient Mother, my great-great-great-great-great (repeat …) Grandmother. I descend from forest people, and before that from trees. My cousins are ferns. My ancestors are the forest floor.
I am thinking of all the ways the trees take care of me, with breath and life, shelter and shade, food and medicine, holding me in cradling arms. I also learned recently that various trees release aerosols which we breathe in as we walk through the forest, and that those aerosols help heal and protect us. Wow! Thank you, Ancient Forest Mother. Or perhaps I should say, Fairy Godmother!
I read in To Speak for the Trees that the ancient Celts knew trees as sentient beings and that “trees possess all the same chemicals we have in our brains. Trees have the neural ability to listen and think; they have all the component parts necessary to have a mind or consciousness.” Again, wow! Reading on, I learned that “forests can think and perhaps even dream.” Dream!? Oh, this changes everything.
Now I’m sleeping with my window open, listening to the trees whisper and breathe in the night. I’m never alone; I think of the tree right outside my window as a great grandmother lightly snoring beside me, dreaming right along with me. Drifting in and out of sleep, I wonder what the forest is dreaming about. May you have sweet dreams, dear Grandmother, dear Fairy Godmother. Do you know how deeply I love you? I think you know. I love you with my whole ancient woodland being. With my whole deep tree self.
—Angie Pierce Jennings, Prairiewoods hosted groups and hospitality coordinator