C is for Climbing Trees

I always climbed trees as a kid. I loved it, I felt at home in trees. I was acknowledged as being the best tree climer in my year. This was because I was larger than most of the others in my build, a little stronger. However this did not translate into sports, I have never been a quick mover!

Climbing trees though does not require quick movement. It requires planning and understanding to see where the branches are, the footholds and the branches you can pull yourself up on. You also have to be able to judge where you should and where you should not climb. No tree climber wishes to damage the tree they climb...

I was never scared of heights and I never felt like I would fall. I always felt like the trees had me.

At home I grew up in an old house with about an acre of garden which contained a lot of trees. A lot of old trees to, many of them fruit trees, planted to feed the house. I used to climb the apple and pear trees, the big plum tree and the nest of tangled Yews. I didn't climb the thorn trees, or the pines or the Limes.

The Limes are ancient and the first branches are well above my head even now. My Dad is well over 6 foot and one time he lifted me up into the lowest branches, but even then, I could barely reach the next branches up. All the branches though form a canopy that comes close to the ground and the huge leaves provide a beautiful cool green shelter from the Summer sun.

At school, I was lucky that some ancient resident had collected trees from all over. I had many non-native trees to climb and admire. Not all trees grow to be giants but in every group of trees, there would always be one ancient one that towered upwards it seemed.

This all reminded me of something I read long along, so I just dug the book out and I looked up the author on amazon too. The book is Flat Rock Journal by Ken Carey and it is the journal of a spiritual walk. Now I have just realised that as much as I love this book, I don't much like the other book by the author I have attempted to read - it was a channeled book and I just don't like the language and feel. In fact I posted the book off to someone I thought might like it only last week....

Anyway, one of the many things he talks about in this book is a vision he has for the future of trees, based on a conversation he had with a tree. It seems that trees need to be mature enough to have the circuitry in place to act as the grand sentient presences that we should have in our forests. By allowing selected trees to mature, the consciousness of the entire forest develops. This is because trees have two types of consciousness, individual and collective.

My teacher Lisa was talking on her blog about what it is to be a shaman in answer to someone's question. In it she talks about how being a Shaman is a title given by a community in recognition of an energy you embody. She says that not only people are called, but trees, animals and rivers as well. Many Shaman are marked young but they don't necessarily become Shaman until they are a little older. Why not the same with Tree Shaman? It fits with Ken Carey's vision.

I often wondered why different woods felt different. Where I grew up, the weather is gentler in some ways than in Cornwall. The winds are quieter, it rains hard when it rains and there is plenty of sun and warmth in the Summer. The land is a patchwork of fields and small woods and wild areas with larger woods inbetween.

I spent a lot of time walking the land around me as a teen with a variety of dogs as company. The local farmer had left areas of wood nearby. One area of wood was full of small trees, a lot of them thorny. It was not a wood you walk through as there was just no room and it never had that depth of atmosphere of some other woods. But driving past it at night, there would often be animals around that wood

A bit further away there was an area of ancient wood with some truly old trees and the atmosphere was very different there. However, I never once met another person walking in that wood for all it's status as a nature reserve. It was quite out of the way, but I don't think that was it. I loved that wild atmosphere...

Another nearby wood was very large with well developed pathways that almost spearated the wood into smaller woods, so that in many ways you were not walking amongst the trees. That wood was always full, at least those big wide paths were. The little paths that took off into the dark of the older parts of the wood were far less visited.

Many of our managed woods have plantation areas. Rows of quick growing trees, harvested in turn. These too have a different feel again. I have to say, I like the idea of keeping some trees to full maturity, not clear cutting whole areas.

I like the idea of there being tree shaman too. I like that there are still woods that are truly wild.