I believe that when we walk among trees, or notice a particular tree, a kind of exchange happens. In my experience, trees love to be met. That might sound anthropomorphic – but it happens.

Trees have always figured in human awareness, in all cultures. (Think of the Tree of Life; the Tree of Knowledge; the Tree of Good and Evil. Think of talking trees, and of walking trees, in fairy and folk tales. Many dreamers have been ‘taken’ under a tree. Thomas the Rhymer is an example, taken to faeryland when under a hawthorn tree.) Our imagination is caught by trees, and we relate to them for more than the physical gifts they offer so freely.

So I am thinking it might be useful to speak of my understanding of the spiritual aspect of relating to trees. What do I mean by ‘spiritual’? In this context, an awareness of subtle dimensions of being beyond the physical/manifest. ‘That which animates’, is another way of speaking of it. Crudely, everything we might sense (intuit or feel) but can’t perceive with our physical senses, although they may lead us there. A sense of a lively and different intelligence in the other-than-human world.

To unpack this a bit: the path I follow in my own life is a convergence of Zen mindfulness practice (being present) and an earth-centred spirituality which draws on bardic and druidic wisdom teachings. 


The reference point for my life, my practice and for the course from which this book arose is that there are non-material planes of being that manifest on the physical plane. Everything around us shares in the web of life and contributes its own particular characteristics and qualities of energy to that web.

I begin with the belief that everything is sacred and worthy of respect and cherishing.

According to this view, on the most dense plane, the physical plane, it may look as if everything is separate, as it appears in differentiated form. This is how we can create deep relationships – via an individual (human, animal, tree and so on). Yet through that individual, we learn about the whole.

And yet, if we shift our gaze from the one silver birch with which we have formed a bond and look beyond it, as it were, to Forest, already we start to see how the whole, the tree collective, has a different, connected quality of being – trees working in community, in synergy.

If we imagine the soil beneath our feet, we now know what a vast interconnected network exists – not just of tree roots but also of a collaboration of different species, such as fungi, aiding each other’s survival.

Beyond this again, beyond Forest, mystics have always known, and scientists too are beginning to recognise, are the physical but also the energetic and invisible webs that link us all through different dimensions of consciousness. The concept that might best embody this invisible energetic spirit field is the Indian notion of prana. Prana is that particular subtle energy, the life-force, that animates the universe and everything in it.

So when we connect with a tree, we’re connecting not only with the biological organism: cells, xylem and phloem, roots, sap, heartwood, bark, trunk, branch, twig, leaf, fruit and so on, but also with a quality of energy that is unique firstly to the species, and secondly to that particular tree. A tree will be taking in air, light, water – and prana (as we all are). All of those qualities are transformed in a tree – or in any other being, and in one form or another are also transmitted, including to us.

When we walk in the woods and feel a particular sense of wellbeing, only some of that is attributable to, for instance, the phytoncides that the tree emits as part of its own immune defence system and which have a beneficial effect on us and our immune systems, and only some in relation to the colour green, as I have mentioned elsewhere. Yet further, some of it is the experience of prana, in this case emanating from trees and taken in by ourselves and, by the same token, vice versa.

Each tree participates in a vast ecosystem of consciousness, in which we are all interdependent. Each tree ‘tribe’ and each individual tree expresses a specific quality of archetypal energy, its own ‘take’ on prana – hence the Celtic tree calendar alphabet in this book with its depiction of archetypes.

In the moment when we pay attention to the being of the tree, we are also opening a channel for a reciprocal relationship between human and tree. And that is, perhaps, the purpose of this book – to facilitate that experience.

From: A Spell in the Forest – tongues in trees

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