The Age of Repair Is Beginning

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Dear Reader,

I am very focused in the studio on my upcoming show Dreaming Animals, and this post explores one of my most profound animal dreams. This dream is interwoven with the hemlock tree, as you will see, and so I’m showcasing the portrait I did of this great tree twenty-one years ago.

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I’ve come this morning to write at a place of power. I wasn’t planning that, I was mostly just planning to write outside, because when I write outside my body relaxes and opens and wild things come tumbling in. And I’d envisioned myself writing in the forest, because I am a Druid and I love the cathedral of a community of trees.

But I found myself instead drawn to the river, and more specifically to this place, where Rock Creek joins the South Toe River. And as I walked here, I mused over an idea I’d had earlier this week, about writing my own Catalog of Mystical Experience—a collection of all my experiences that are clearly-from-somewhere-beyond-this-realm. The place I was walking towards, I realized, held such an experience for me. I knew then, exactly, what the land wanted me to write.

First, let me describe the scene. I sit at the foot of a hemlock tree, right above the confluence of creek and river. As the creek joins the river it twists around shoals of ancient stones in meandering curves, so that water is flowing in all directions. In the west are the Black Mountains, at whose feet I both worship and make my home. 

I have lived here for twenty-two years, and in that time, the hemlock trees have mostly died. To say that I love the hemlock tree is a poor description. It is more precise to say that I have a deep relationship with this tree, where I now sit, and also with the species of the tree. This relationship began in my early twenties. 

It was a Friday night and I was on a camping trip, but apparently so was everyone else. I searched along a US Forest Service road for one of the little marked places where camping is allowed. But all the spots were taken, and it was getting dark. In a bit of desperation I set up camp (illegally) under the great sheltering branches of a hemlock tree.

That night I had a Dream. The kind of dream that absolutely changes you. In my dream I encountered a mammoth—smaller than the ones we usually think of, though its presence was decidedly not small. It was a tremendous being, electric with spiritual power. It came charging up to me, and trumpeting with its trunk, it demanded I accept the spiritual truth that nothing is ever lost.

I had been grieving hard the extinction of species, and after this dream I had something else to place alongside this grief— a dream-given knowledge that required a reformation of my psyche’s integration of my physical experience. This dream was so powerful, so direct, that to this day I have an unwavering faith in its message.

Fast forward maybe a decade or so. I’m now in my 30s, and married with children and stepchildren—a very full and demanding life—and I’ve recently moved to this place, which is a haven of beauty and also hemlock trees. This is when I learn the hemlocks will die, en masse. And I begin to meditate with them, when I can, which given my life circumstances is not very often. I draw a great tribute to them, Tree of Life, which I would call my first masterpiece. I write my first published essay in honor of this tree and the gifts she had given me.

More years pass. Somehow I find my way back to meditating with the trees. The hemlocks are still quite alive, but they all have the tell-tale cotton in their needles, the nests of the killing adelgid. I come to this tree, where I sit now, and lay my back against her, like I did before, not really thinking or seeking anything, just a little tired, and sad.

But then something happens—she recognizes me. It’s instantaneous, profound, unmistakable, wordless, and powerful. The tree recognizes me with a prana-like embrace. It’s an experience I would absolutely highlight in my Catalog of Mystical Experience.

Since then I have had many other experiences. I believe that this tree opened up a pathway of communication in my body. She did it, and I did it, by developing both the relationship and the gifts of the dream she gave me.

Now as I write this I am quite literally cradled in her roots. She leans perilously over the creek, and I do not think her sap runs in this world any longer. I have watched her needles fall to the very last. But she is absolutely here with me, and as I walked to her, before I’d even put this pen to paper, she was telling me things.

The river, here especially, is always changing. The hemlocks have died, and a hundred years before them, the American Chestnuts. There have been floods caused by climate change, that carved deep cuts into the riverbank and grabbed whole trees only to deposit them downstream, scoured of life. To love this place is to know it will change, and to not fight against it.

But in all the disorder and change, as structures that have stood for decades, or ages, are broken, there is an opening to join our consciousness with the land, to build a relationship so deep that it extends into the foundational Otherworld, and we do this not with any great shaman’s skill but with the simplest of things embedded in every human being—imagination and love.

The changes of this time require of us our grief, for all things must change and should rightly be mourned. It might even be that the grief is what opens us, what rouses us from our slumber into a charged state. In mourning we can also begin to incorporate into our waking awareness the truth that our reality is but a segment or aspect of a much greater reality, a reality that is always speaking to us in a language that our bodies can understand, for it is a felt experience. And if we do not give the paradigm of the day authority over our own experience, and allow the Mystery to blossom within us, something wild happens. The world that is now crowning in our collective Imaginal realm, the world that will become in this next age, the Age of Repair, this world can begin to take root in the here and the now. We can begin the work of bringing it forth.

When we allow the greater reality to blossom within us it can take root in this world.

What I am saying is that there is a future for us, and by us I mean the living world. We are moving from the great shift from the Age of Despair, when human consciousness was severed from the living world, to the Age of Repair, as we take up the great work of rebuilding what was severed and remaking a global pact that honors the living world and the dignity of all life. This is the work of deepening our experience of consciousness and allowing the consciousness of the living world to speak to us in whatever ways our bodies know best how to listen.

Spaces are opening up, in the land, in our collective body, in our collective consciousness. And in these spaces we must make intentional, loving relationship with the living and elemental world. For me this means coming here, and writing. It means allowing my body to feel the praise and wonder of this ecosystem. It means laying my back to trees and connecting with them. It means tending to my dreams, sleeping outside, weaving my consciousness with the consciousness of the living world. 

We can acknowledge the presence of the greater world in every moment we meet, even in the throes of grief and despair we can hold space in ourselves, or even just the possibility of that space, where we can use our love and our imagination in whatever way the land guides us, with intention and faith, to birth a new world.

That, the hemlock tree tells me, is enough.