Spending time in the company of trees slows me down. Both still and full of movement they exist in a different realm of time. I often ponder their biology and the amazing way they connect all things. When I draw them I try to get inside the feeling of their wavy branches and their fierce and filamented roots. Down through the layers of the soil they go; finding water and pumping it up through trunk and branch and out past the tiny pores on the underside of their leaves. The same water which in time will become rain, rivers and mighty cascading waterfalls.
This treeish way of being has helped me relate to the twists and sometimes challenging turns of my life in a different way. My mind goes back to a moment that became a turning point. It was 2018, I was standing beneath a grove of oak trees on Hampstead Heath in London. Some of them had been there a long time and their shape told the story of their battering and bruising, their flourishing and flowering. I was dealing with the implications of a recent breast cancer diagnosis. My mind was swimming with a myriad of choices, confronted with the pressure of time and decisions to be made. Fear pulsated through my body, the future seemed bleak and I didn’t know what to do. I took my shoes off and slowly moved amongst the trees. I connected to their long weather-strong roots reaching down through the watery layers of the earth. I traced the lines of their wide curving branches, spreading out and bursting into leaf, filtering and catching the burning rays of the sun. My mind settled and I felt held and home within the miracle of existence.
My partner Rod and I now live 12,000 miles from London in the Wairarapa Valley in Aotearoa New Zealand. Our work involves bringing the wonder of trees to children. As part of our education programme we bring children from local schools to the remnant pockets of native forest. There they stand beneath mighty podocarps; mātai, tōtara and kahikatea. They do all the things one might expect of a child let loose in a forest; they climb, they play hide and seek and they look with wonder at the hammered, smooth and scaly bark. They find fungi and dare themselves to touch the tiny spiders that hide under logs. Often without doing anything in particular, as we walk into the forest a sense of calm permeates the group. Gentle invitations into silence can support the feeling of abandon and out of this comes some amazingly creative written work by the children.
Last month, a group of 9 and 10 year olds from Southend School, nestled into a quiet place in the heart of Waihinga Bush, near Martinborough. We sat still and the sounds of the bush came close. I spoke of the challenges that faced mosses and lichens; the first squidgy plants that clung to the edges of streams. This deep time story set the scene for the children’s writing that morning. In the words they crafted I felt the force of creativity that over millions of years figured out ingenious ways of enabling early plants to grow and thrive beyond the waters’ edge. In time these plants grew into trees with trunks firm and tall and branches able to reach out to catch the sunlight.
As I weave the threads of this blog post together Rod and I are in the Sri Lankan Highlands. We are staying in a little cob house, surrounded by an explosion of life in the lush shining trees of the jungle. Tamarind, bodhi, jackfruit, coconut, cacao and rubber trees tower above us. Black pepper vines climb up long straight mottled trunks, reaching above lemon grass, lantana and many other brightly coloured flowers on the forest floor. The cob house is on the rocky edge of a loud and tumbling waterfall . It is a restorative place to be writing; high up in the canopy of wonderful life-giving trees.
Words and photos: Jane Riddiford