Isobel, the song tree

Tank Green/ June 22, 2024/ Writing Walking

The first time I saw Isobel it was raining and I had been walking for a good few miles through the North Downs. I saw a small, appealing clearing in amongst some beech trees in Bagden Wood, so I left the path and sat on a stump in the middle of the clearing. The canopy of the beech trees sheltered me from the rain, so I was able to settle down and stare off into the half-focused distance. I felt comfortable there, despite the rain; I was quiet and content.

At first I thought it was the clearing itself which called to me, and it was in a way. There was a veil which hovered behind the colours of the green and yellowing leaves above me, the carpet of auburn beech nuts and old leaves below me, and the glistening blackness of the trees’ bark encircling me. I could feel parts of myself slip through the veil to find the easy comfort of a homeland. To feel content like this was why I walked, and so I welcomed the calm peacefulness into my core.

When I first started walking, I did it for the oaks. Everything about an oak tree is magical to me. Their stature, their power, their shape; they are a truth which I have carried with me for a long, long time. They are a fact of existence: something hard I can push up upon when I need a boundary or a wall for way marking. They are the most tangible and material of all the trees of the woods, and represent, for me, a solid security.

Then one day I realised that my hair is the colour of fallen beech leaves, and I marvelled at that. I was slightly embarrassed by the enormous compliment I was paying myself, but saw too the truth in it. My hair is that beautiful colour of a woodland floor in a beech grove which so entrances me. The thick, rich crunch of the nuts and leaves, at once soft and warm, inviting. I walk with a halo of auburn every day of my life, as if my very mind were wrapped in a forest floor. I became on that day a beech tree; on some days, the good days, the lucky ones.

From that moment on, I saw the beech trees in a new way now that I was one of them. I felt their soft protection: the way they rise up, often slenderly and gracefully, and give us a peaceful and safe space in which to shelter. In the summer, their leaves glow the most vital of greens and give the walker a shade dappled with clarity. In the winter, their veined silhouettes remind us they are the mirror to our breath. Mostly though, they are a quiet and unassuming graceful safety. They welcome us to walk amongst them. They are the most sociable of all the trees of the woods.

So I lay in that small clearing of my sistren, and let the part of myself which needed to go through the veil and be replenished. Be reminded of who it was. Who I was. Be with its kin and relax. It breathed out and I breathed in, as we both quietly lay there thinking of nothing and watching a crow fly, rough and ragged, from beech tree to beech tree. Eventually I recalled myself to me, nourished and alert, and readied myself to resume walking.

And there she was: Isobel.

I do not know how I missed her at first, such is her stature. She is the old lady of the woods and sits in the palm of it. Nay, she is the palm, the very centre of it, and she pulls herself up like fingers cupping a sacred object. Everything in that forest grows within her. Everything is called to her. She encompasses all.

Isobel’s black bark, studded with tree pearls, glistened in the rain, even as her age meant she was slowly melting back down into the forest floor. Her girth was such that I wondered when she had last been embraced, but then I saw that the people of the forest gathered around her in a ring, clasping hands so they could hold her close, as one of them would have in Isobel’s youth.

I am ashamed to say that I left Isobel then. I thought she was dying as two of her great boughs had fallen and lay perpendicular on the floor. I thought her stories were long gone, given to her siblings and children of the woods. I thought she was busy folding herself back down into the earth’s innards, to eventually arise one day as someone else, many someone elses. Yes, I genuinely thought she was done with stories; I only heard the voices of the rabbits: the young asking why she was melting, the old chastising the young for lack of manners. I saw that Isobel was a meeting place, but I did not imagine her an active participant, so I moved on and away.

***

It has been a great many years since I saw Isobel and so much has changed: I am not even the same person, for starters. I have arisen from the ashes of myself and been reborn, and I have shed a great many things. I have travelled the world fourteen times and camped out wild under innumerable stars. I have sung for my friends and my family, and walked green pastures by and by. The wind has knotted my hair, my fingernails are jagged, and the wool of my jumper is worn thin at the elbow. There are a great many creases about my eyes, but my body is still strong from all this walking. I am still strong, but, I too am old now.

This time when I walked to Isobel, I meant to. I made my way through Ranmore Common treading many paths until I found her. A part of me was afraid that tree surgeons had felled her in my absence, but then a moth landed on my collar and told me where to find my love, my Isobel. I walked up a steep hill to reach her and as I approached, I felt my feet grow warm from the ground as her strong power reached out to me from beneath the forest floor.

I approached Isobel from every direction. From the east and the west, the north and the south: I wanted to see her from every horizon. I wanted to know the way her boughs reached up. I wanted to see the space in the forest canopy she occupied. I wanted to observe the way her neighbours’ branches accommodated and encircled her – where there was sky and where there was tree. I wanted to know what it was she reached for and touched in all of her living days.

It was a sunny day, and whilst she no longer glistened in a rainy blackness, the textures and folds of her bark seemed more apparent. We had a long conversation then, she and I, about how to live and how to die. I understood that she was an end point, but also that her hollowed out trunk represented a way through. Her innards were flowing away so that she could make space for something growing in her centre, and I understood then, that the something growing was me.

I closed my eyes, smiling at that realisation, and felt what it was like to breathe. I pulled in the nourishment that she, and the other trees of the woods were giving me, and held it tight in my belly. Allowed it to swell up inside of me, filling me with a giant, pulsating ball of energy. I wanted to really feel my breath, as I knew it would be a very long time before I had the pleasure again.

After I had my fill of breath, I slowly took off my clothes and shoes and crawled towards Isobel in silence. I touched every crack and crevice on her trunk until I was as familiar with it as I was with my own body. So I could know her sites of weakness and strength, just as I knew mine. I climbed her trunk, and wound my body between her branches, before slowly returning to the ground before her.

Isobel and I forged a deal that day: me naked and on my knees before her; she ancient and dying before me. I knew that I would give my life in order to find it, and she would say goodbye in order to live on. So, I went around to the northern side of her giant trunk and found the wound in her belly. Within the opening was a root baby growing and I understood that it was me: I was a root and anchor to Isobel’s life; she was the womb of my creation. Through each other, we would be reborn. Now it is my turn to wear the crown. Scattered are my possessions, dispersed are my thoughts, all that is left is a slow and silent return to earth, an eternal unbecoming.