We can’t lose our way if we go to the
root of things, to the roots of a tree. By finding the right tree — a tree you
know that also knows you — you can reconnect with the soul of nature. You can
find grounding for soul in this world, and a shaman’s ladder to travel between
the worlds.
I once moved to a place in the country because of a tree, an old
white oak behind the house that had survived the lightning. I knew it for a
guardian of the land and a wise ancient. Sitting with that tree, I would have
impressions of all the seasons it had lived. When I walked the farm road toward
it, I would sometimes feel its silent greeting. Sometimes I watched the moon
rise over the hills from up in its branches. The oak became a tree of my
dreaming and a portal to the ancestors. Rooted deep in American earth, the oak
also joined me to the ways of oak-seers of my bloodlines in the Old World, to
the druids “grey,
wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed" (as Yeats sang) to the sacred oak at Dodona where the Greeks listened for the
voice of a god in the creak and rustle of the branches. After the first snows,
when the cold stung my eyes, I saw that the oak still hung on to its leaves,
longer than any other shedding trees on that land. Oaks hang on.
Spending good time with a tree that welcomes us is a great way to
repair and renew our connection with the soul of nature. Trees have
personalities, as individuals and as types, and sometimes we find they have a
second personality that was not originally arboreal, a spirit from a different
kinship group. In front of the farmhouse that I purchased because of the white
oak was a great sugar maple. The patterns of the bark around the place where
its broad trunk divided made the vivid likeness of an ancient Native shaman
with a storm of gray hair and a long, twisted body. I learned later that there
are legends in the Native traditions of Northeast America of shamans who have, in one of
their soul bodies taken up residence in trees after physical death.
South of the farmhouse was an elderly apple tree that no longer
gave fruit but still put out a few leaves in the spring time, and that let a
few branches fall, which I burned in the hearth of the family room. The
sweetness of apple, through pine and spruce and hickory, provided a kind of
olfactory portal, and I would slip into conscious dreaming of ancestors for
whom the apple branch was the passport between the worlds. North of the house
was another great old tree, a shagbark hickory, that shed limbs as well as
leaves profusely, as the deer sheds its antlers. I would often find antlers in
the hickory hollow, dropped by bucks in the great herds of red-tailed deer that
made their home in our woods, from which hunters were banned.
What trees call to you on country walks or from memory or dream?
Any tree may be your soul tree, and it may also be your sole tree, the One Tree
through which the three worlds of the shaman’s cosmos are joined, and which may
become your ladder between them.
Text adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.
Art: "World Tree" by Annick Bougerolle
