Christmas

 Christmas Lyrics

Came upon a midnight clear

Hark! The Herald Angels sing

Rudolph with your nose so bright

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas

by Bing Crosby

So tender and mild

To the newborn King

Making spirits bright. What fun it is to ride and sing

a sleighing song tonight

And a Happy New Year

Star of wonder

My realization is, "As I turn to the words of each carol, I remember them from years past, and know my personal ritual is being observed with millions of other worshippers around the globe, connecting our voices in echoing moments of harmony."

Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year

Enter the Woods: Finding My Trees, And the Mother Trees Part Two

The Copper Beech of my childhood home was where I discovered my quiet place within.

Scared and brave, I climbed higher than my bedroom window.
Straddled on a branch, not moving, I bent my head to watch
clouds. When my mother called, I didn't answer.*

In motherhood, with my daughters on their own, I planned a house sale with one sad decision. Leaves were dropping from a yellow maple tree in the front yard, and a large branch perfect for a child's swing appeared ready to break. Stationed in a lawn chair, I watched as the crew began dropping the sawn branches. When I casually turned my head toward the neighbor's woods, I was surprised to see the aura of those trees wavering between their topmost branches and the blue sky. My sadness shifted to encompass their seeming grief, or possibly their good-bye. I felt grateful we were there to witness.

Trees in Washington

Thirteen years later, I built a home in India in a field where only a few others lived at a distance. Inside my tall brick wall, I planted a six-foot neem tree in view of the window above the kitchen sink. One morning, as I was slowly washing dishes and gazing at the young neem tree, I spontaneously said—"Trees are my friends"—my voice surprising me. Why had it taken me so long to recognize this? I remembered how as a budding poet in my thirties, I had written a poem about my childhood love of trees.

Beneath a tree-umbrella
a girl rides a raft
of roots, dirt-cool
idly rubbing the bark.

Years later, I now knew why I had been comforted by trees all my life. 

Suzanne Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest explores mothering in the world of trees—by older ones for the younger growing nearby. She grew up in a family that made its living cutting down forests. At age twenty, on a seasonal job for a logging company in western Canada, she was assigned to assess established plantations of seedlings put in to replace harvested trees. Forestry school had taught her that "trees only compete with one another to survive,"* but what she realized later was that in this ecosystem, trees and plants seem "to need one another for survival."*

Trees in Oregon

Simard discovered, to her surprise, that the forest has trees that are "ancient giants. . . . social beings that exchange nutrients, help one another, and communicate to others."* She named them "the Mother Trees" and made a commitment to take their discovery to global awareness.

"Go find a tree—your tree," Simard encourages her readers. "Imagine linking into her network, connecting to other trees nearby. Open your senses."* My chosen tree is nearby. She is old with a big girth. I've set a chair near her for visiting. To date, I've stopped several times, only leaning my back against her, for now, and just for moments . . . then having closed my eyes, inwardly I speak to her.

 My realization is, "A shift in how we see trees, from being useful for shade, protection, producing crops, providing building material, or offering beauty may expand to a personal relationship that we could name 'in friendship,' or even 'as mothering.'"

* Prema Jasmine Camp, A Flower for God: A Memoir (Seattle, WA: Wilson Duke Press, 2021), 40.

* Camp, 44.

* Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forrest (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021), 50.

* Simard, 50.

* Richard Schiffman, "'Mother Trees’ Are Intelligent: They Learn and Remember,” Scientific American, May 4, 2021, para 2, https:// www.scientificamerican.com/article/mother-trees-are-intelligent-they learn-and-remember.

* Simard, 305.

Enter The Woods: Part One

At the Farm
1950 – 1954

In the early '50s, visiting in summers at my grandparents' farm in North Newport, Maine, from about ages seven to eleven, the woods that bordered the back field of the farm were part of my childhood.

Those summers . . . I felt quiet and alone, but boredom didn’t quite happen because there were sheds and an attic and doors to the fields. Then woods.*

In the back field, to the south of the farmhouse, I followed Grampa's line fence dividing his mown hay from the neighbor's cows, passing wild strawberries, tiny and green. It was Grammie's stern words, "Don't go into the woods," that I heard again as I drew closer. The first trees were sparse but behind them they were close together, and I knew it was where I could get lost. I'd turn around. Off in the distance, the farmhouse looked far away.

Visiting Anna
1980

Anna and I had met at a small group of writers in Western Massachusetts. As I was new to the area, I was surprised when she offered not only friendship but an invitation to her home in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains. Driving up the steep road, as woods appeared on the passenger side of the car, I had felt my excitement rising. Following our visit and now driving down the incline with the woods on the driver's side, spontaneously I pulled to the side of the road and parked. Getting out of the car, I crossed the road and entered the woods. I took a few steps, aware of the dim light, the quiet, and of how far away a late afternoon sky seemed when seen only between the tree tops. With a few more steps I discovered a brook and sat on the bank, with my knees drawn to the side to be as close as possible. I watched as the water covered only some of the stones, finding its way around the banks—its burbling and murmuring part of my contemplation.

Now in the last year of my seventies, knowing the insight of foreshadowing, I can write of how I was in the fourth decade of my life before I accomplished what the little stream had accomplished—finding my own path.

Visions
1990

During the fall of 1990, I began to see faint images of scenes between wakefulness and sleep. I would later call them psychic experiences, but at first they were unexplained, unusual, and unshared additions to my bedtime routine.

An inner child workshop drawing, by Prema’s inner child

In a vision that grew longer and fuller each night, I walked at the edge of a field and then into a forest, accompanied by a growing number of animals. Where I turned, a fat, dusty-golden mare stood with her head up, or sometimes grazing. . . .

In the forest, I stood with the animals in a glade bright with sun. It had a rectangle of earth for a garden, where Jesus first appeared wearing a white turtleneck jersey, planting seeds. Later, he hovered once above me, in a white robe ablaze in light.

Emerging from the forest, I rode my dusty-golden mare bareback, galloping along a country lane through an apple orchard, then up into the blue sky.*

Photo by Scott Cramer

While as a child, I had not felt safe entering the woods, I did now because I had seen Jesus in them as my friend and then as the Son of God.

My realization is, "There may be a comfortable feeling of deep connection when what has been remembered over a lifetime reemerges with new awareness."

*  Prema Jasmine Camp, A Flower for God: A Memoir (Seattle, WA: Wilson Duke Press, 2021). 32.

*  Ibid. 133.