Speaking Tree

Remember what I have said about those red marks on oaks which seem to have no explanation? How I think of them as names? Well, what if they, and the very form of the tree, are language? Or, I suppose, story.

I saw a new oak up in a field near the Reserve and went to see the tree close up.

This was not a talking tree, not a talking tree in my mind, in the words in my mind, but it had many bauble-like projections on the bark.

This was part of the idialect of that specific tree! It was "who he was" as much as the form he takes.

As I continued on, I saw a few more baubles and then a lot of waves, in oak, willow and pine.

I was still walking as earth-stuff walking through earth-stuff and again seemed to scare the creatures a little less than usual. I was rewarded by seeing two hares lope away and, in the place where I sat for lunch, saw a "form": that is the place where hares regularly lie down. They scrape it out a little and it's like an earth-stuff nest. There, in the earth, hairs of a hare.

The tree with whom I sat, one of my Sentinel Trees, was sad. He said that he had thought his failures to flourish were due to shading, and when some of the trees around him were cut (they were hawthorns "laid" rather than felled, so they continue to live, but lower) he felt optimistic. But now he realises that changing the circumstances of light alone has not been enough to change him. He says he misses the connections his heritage led him to expect, all the woodland plants and their fungal friends. He feels that he cannot flourish in this denuded world. He says that not all oaks suffer as much as he from the lack of these connections, but that he is one who needs the companions his ancestors enjoyed.

I could understand. And I sat with him. Wishing that either of us could cure the other.