What the Mother Trees Know

A few weeks ago, on one of those warm evenings early fall sometimes gives us, my family set a table in the middle of the creek in the woods behind our house. The water was low, so we carried the table right down into it and let the creek run quietly around its legs. We hung strings of lights through the trees and lit dozens of candles. We dressed for the occasion. There was music, and two soups, one of them butternut squash, and a loaf of sourdough shaped like a pumpkin sitting in the center of it all.

Our grown children and their partners gathered around that table, and for a few hours no one was in a hurry. We sat. We ate. We took it all in. As the light faded the candles grew brighter, and none of us wanted to leave.

We didn't know it would be the last time.

Last week, the bulldozers came. For fourteen years, those woods have been the view from our back window. In a matter of days, the understory was gone. The brush, the young saplings, the tangle of growth our kids used to disappear into when they were small... all of it cleared. What's left are the mother trees. The oldest ones, standing tall in open ground, suddenly visible in a way I had never seen them before.

I keep going to the window. Some mornings I grieve. Some mornings I just look.

I've read that in a forest, the oldest trees are connected underground to the younger ones growing around them. Through their roots and a quiet web of fungi, they share water and nourishment, feeding what grows in their shade. Most of what holds a forest together is happening where we can't see it.

I often think of the work of unfolding in this same way. So many of the women I sit with have lived through a clearing. A faith that no longer holds. A community that couldn't make room for their questions. A role they gave years of their lives to. Sometimes the clearing comes slowly. Often it comes like the bulldozers, all at once and without asking. And when it does, it can feel like nothing is left standing.

I'm in something of a clearing season in my own work right now, too, with things shifting and changing shape. And I am noticing, standing at my window, that a clearing reveals as much as it takes. The mother trees were there all along. I just couldn't see them for everything that had grown up around them.

It makes me wonder what in us is rooted that deep. What remains when so much else has been stripped away... the knowing that lives in our bodies, the love that was real even when the structures around it were not, the self that was quietly there underneath it all.

And I keep coming back to that table in the creek. We didn't gather because we knew what was coming. We gathered because the evening was beautiful and we wanted to be together. But I find myself grateful for it now in a way I couldn't have been then. That night fed us. My body holds it as a memory of that place being whole and good, and of us being in it together.

I have begun to believe this is part of why we gather at all. When women come together in a circle, something happens that can't happen alone. We tell the stories we've carried quietly for years, and someone stays with us in them. We hear another woman's story and recognize pieces of our own. Our nervous systems settle in the presence of others who are steady and kind. Old wounds that were formed in relationship begin to heal in relationship. This is the work, and it is real work. It is sometimes tender and sometimes hard, and it is held by the people around the table.

Like the mother trees, we pass something to one another underground. Nourishment. Witness. A sense that we are not as alone in the clearing as we feared.

Have you lived through a clearing? What was still standing when it was over? And where are you being fed right now, before you know how much you'll need it?

This fall, I'm inviting you to notice your mother trees. To gaze at what remains with curiosity, not only grief. And to say yes to the gatherings... the long tables, the slow evenings, the circles where your story can be held and healed. They feed us in ways we may not understand until later.