Tree stars
Photo of a beech tree trunk in a woodland with the shadows of leaves on its trunk.
It is an undeniable fact that some woods are more alive than others. I should know, I have walked enough of them. Some woods, like this beech woods near Upper Enham, have a thickness to the air. Once you walk in, you feel yourself pass through some kind of invisible wall, safe in the liquid embrace of the life of the forest. There is an overwhelming sense of abundance and you hear something beyond the edge of sound. You cannot but be aware of the unseen energy of the forest. Feel it pushing up against your body, providing you with some essential thing you didn’t even know was missing.
There is something undisturbed about some woods and in that peace, the trees swell out from themselves, filling the spaces between them with their spirit bodies. So when you walk—a quiet, slow walk of wonder—you come to know the life of the forest in a way beyond time, beyond sight, beyond anything measurable or empirical, but rooted in a fact deeper and older than reason. When you walk amongst trees’ spirit bodies, you come to know, as an incontestable fact, that consciousness was here before matter. That consciousness is the underlay, matter the veneer; every single ancient woodland is proof of that.
The older the forest, the stronger the feeling. For instance, when I walked in a redwood forest in Big Sur, my skin prickled as it came into contact with the trees’ spirit bodies. If left undisturbed for long enough, the wandering spirit bodies of trees coalesce into something like matter: those fog banks which roll through the redwoods are one example of that. When you walk in truly ancient and undisturbed woods, you feel the trees’ spirit bodies caress you in more places than your heart; your entire body responds to their touch.
When I walked through Long Copse woods, there was no rolling fog bank as the trees’ spirit bodies were younger and lighter than that. Instead, there was a dancing of sunlight, a lifting of spirits, and a playful sense of being amongst friends. When I arrived, I was just in time for a black and white movie show. The forest creatures had gathered around their favourite tree star watching the sun’s projections of the leaf shadows dance across the smooth, grey bark of the beeches. And me, I stood there with them and wondered at my luck.