There's a really big oak tree at the Reserve that I have wanted to climb since I first saw it. I had put a big tube against the trunk as a step, but still couldn't make it. On this occasion I thought, huh, there are huge blocks of wood all over due to the felled trees nearby... I could use that! I leaned it against the trunk, stepped from the tube to the block and hauled myself up into a massive bowl between five great branching stems. I'd made it!
I sat there. With a bramble and a wild rose and waited.
And waited.
I was up there for well over an hour. Though it didn't feel that long. Nor did I feel that cold, until I descended and realised I was stiff with the chill.
And what did the oak say?
This huge tree is surrounded by oaks with Acute Oak Decline. The tree said that their family protected them (it is disrespectful and gender... I don't know... so the clumsiness of them), taking the disease into their own heartwood and keeping the ancient oak safe. I expressed my gladness, but asked why? The tree said, because I remember how to be an oak.
In The Light Eaters there is a section about how plants pass to their seeds "skills" to survive in the environment they find themselves in (drought, or shade). But this was more. The old oak has lived through so very many eras and changes that they have the wisdom to respond to anything that has been thrown at oak trees in the last three or more centuries.
It's not just parents protecting children, but the young protecting those with wisdom. An encouraging thought for a Crone.
You can see in the images some of the sick trees around this huge oak.
I asked what I should do and the oak said, as I keep learning how to be oak, you need to keep learning how to be human. And that means? I asked. The oak's response was that the deep heart of all species is to know how to live well in the entangled community of all and others and difference; to see the community as self and the self as community and to be a part of a greater flourishing.
At the end, those red marks I find on so many trees. Which I think of as the oak's "name". This oak had two; one like the normal scratched redness and the other a hollow, with that peculiar, evocative shape inside... a face? My face? I saw myself in the bleeding heart of the tree?
Later, at home, I realised that there was a lightness in my spirits that had been absent for so long. I felt the red flame of life inside me.
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