Often, when I close my eyes, I return to your oaks.
It’s not a single tree I go back to. It’s the whole forest.
I stand, head pressed against a trunk,
and I wait to be shown.
A few months back, I walked in real time there,
feet on the domed diaphragm of the earth,
lungs stretching up,
around me,
over me.
I felt you there, even though I don’t know exactly who ‘you’ is.
Maybe that’s the draw of the forest,
of the oaks.
It’s never only about the trees.
We somehow know they’re a touchable version of truth
if only we’re still enough to hear it.
As I stood, people passed through, walking their dogs.
We’d nod hello, exchange a murmur of required politeness
and I’d want to call out,
do you feel it too?
What we’re feeling I don’t know.
Perhaps I could make it physical?
Do your legs feel stronger for being here?
Your heart more stable for spending the time?
Questions based on the universal knowing
that if we stepped sideways out of our body,
we too would grow leaves.
I stood longer than I had time for in your forest.
I lingered.
It felt rude to leave.
The trees there, showing so much strength and care.
If I left, I’d be missing something.
A limb perhaps,
a branch,
a green shoot,
something important.
I wanted to be sure they knew.
Thank you, I tell them,
I understand your generosity.
I read more about your oaks,
and I want to tell you,
to the Greeks, the oak was the sacred tree of Zeus.
To the Nords, it was to Thor.
The Greeks believed in hamadryads,
spirits born and bonded to a certain tree
on which its life depends.
I whisper, and wonder to myself,
are we not all then
hamadryads?
And to you the woman, who walked the Scottish countryside in a time not hers to own
whose money reclaimed the land but whose spirit revived its breath,
it was Zeus, and Thor and the spirit of Hamadryads that coursed through your blood,
that saved the oaks.
But perhaps I have that wrong.
In hindsight, I think perhaps it’s you,
and the oaks,
that coursed through theirs.
