As an offering this spring season, I want to share a story I created, in the wee hours of an October morning in 2021 for my beloved, Fern, as a way to help her fall back asleep. I was trying to tell a story that wove all the lessons I was learning in my Root to Rise Contemplative Community, where we were reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer on a weekly basis as a sacred text, as well as the lessons that came to me from reading Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard.
I was also feeling this call to weave in a connection to this ancient forest that I was introduced to a few years ago in my imaginal realm meditation work by a guide of mine, a doe named Lavinia, who led me to a circle of oak trees with a huge stump in the middle and told me to stand or sit upon the heartwood at the center of the circle to receive the energy that exists at the center of the universe which also lives in the core of us and the earth, as well as in the core of everything in existence and beyond. That oak grove in the imaginal realm was the inception point for the story The Circle of Oaks.
I spent from October of 2021 until spring 2022 slowly working on turning it from a verbal story to a written one and then another year tweaking it and honing the flow. I think it’s done now other than some editing. I have shared it with my loves, Elena and Fern, and they say it’s complete and since it’s about and for them I will let it be complete!
I would be honored if you had some time to read it. I want it to be a story families read together; growns read and remember the magick of a brand new story book that offers lessons you didn’t know you needed; children read and want to live out the precepts; elders read and recognize themselves and their communities within; organizations read and remember where their foundations can be centered.
If this story has found its way to you, I consider you soul kin as the daughter oaks recognized the children who came into their circle.
May your soul remember this forest and the story of the Mother Oak and her Circle deep within even as you read the words for the first time.
May 8, 2023
Welcome
The forest beckons on sunny days in late spring. Along its edge, the siblings peer into an ancient realm. Arm in arm, they pass through the veil of unseen silk spun cobwebs, tickling their faces and reminding them that there are nearly invisible weavers of magic between the trees, enveloping them with more wonders to behold.
Their souls are immediately recognized by the old spirits of the woods, whose secrets circle in little gusts of wind-swept flowers and old leaves spiraling along the path ahead, whispering for the children to follow; they do, enchanted by the rustling sounds, the sun rays streaming through the canopy of trees dappling the ground with mosaics of moving light, and the tiniest of insects sparkling in and out of dancing sun rays like luminescent fairies.
As they move deeper into the forest, the morning echoes the collective song of the Cicada, crashing and receding as if a great ocean wave lives in the forest. If they stay long enough into the evening, a melodious chorus of frogs and crickets whose gentle hum mirrors the sea on a quiet windless day, will replace those cicada waves.
Ancestors
With a clear path laid out before them, the siblings begin to notice the abundance of animal elders. Great Grandfather Cardinal is the first to catch their eye as he is always nearby watching over them. Great Grandmother Butterfly flitters past stopping for a drink of flower essence along her journey to far off adventures in the beyond.
Squirrels scamper past in a game of chase, which quickly returns to a diligent search for acorns, nuts, seeds, and sometimes a tasty flower, fruit, or insect that happens to be in their path, modeling a balance of sustainable work and play.
Water trickles nearby, out of sight, but close enough to spot Beaver making his way to build his dam. He passes many a white tailed Rabbit, dodgingly sprinting across the path, leaping into the camouflage of the many ferns spread upon the forest floor. Beaver notices not their frivolity in his haste to get back to his work.
A Groundhog family lumber along, oblivious to the children’s quiet, giggly delight to come upon their journey. But the small herd of grazing Deer, whose keen sense of hearing perk up at the laughter, look up abruptly. They know humans well and to be wary and on guard. But something about the siblings puts the deer at ease and they resume snacking, head down; all but one mama, who stays upright and attentive, making sure these small humans keep to their path away from her baby in a burrow nearby.
The Clearing
The winding path is leading the children to a source of great sunlight ahead brightening the densest part of the forest. As they approach, immense twisted oak trees prevent a direct view, yet the small path carved out between trees spills into a large clearing filled with low grasses, wild flowers and medicinal herbs pollinated by butterflies, dragonflies and an occasional hummingbird or two zipping about in delight. When the siblings step out from under the cool forest canopy into the bright, perfect full circle of midday sunshine, they squint above them at a clear unobstructed blue sky.
A circle of twelve massive oak trees surround them as if meeting for a ceremony about to begin. Their wide and winding trunks are spread well apart and yet their swirling, jutting branches interlace within one another’s in a huddle formation. All the while, their roots intwine upon, around, and through one another, weaving an interlocking network of arms along the surface and then plunging into the earth reaching out toward a central point in the heart of the clearing. A massive stump, whose base is surrounded by tiny sprouting saplings, reaches its own ancient roots back out to each tree of the circle mirroring the rays of the sun above. The siblings know a family in an eternal embrace just below the surface when they see one. They come from one themselves.
Sacred Hallowed Place
“What a strange and wonderful place this is,” the children say to each other as they approach the massive tree stump whose canopy once was the highest of all the trees in the forest and shaded this whole clearing. They hold the bone knowing ways to ask permission from trees and plants before interacting directly with them and to listen in your heart for an answer. As each sibling closes their eyes, they receive a surge of playfulness which they take as consent. Proceeding, they tightrope walk upon the massive roots, lean down whisper sweet words of encouragement to the tiny sapling sprouts, and peer over the massive stump; its plentiful rings, the circumference vast, tell a story of elderhood many centuries old. In unison, they both are called to remove their shoes and climb up to stand, hands linked, upon the darker center part of the tree stump known as the heartwood, the center of not only this tree but of this entire forest. The children receive, in their bone knowing way, that this place is the literal Heart of the Wood.
Song of Mother Oak
As if this understanding unlocks an ancient forest riddle, the wind picks up and the circle of oak trees surrounding them begin to sway in unison not in keeping with the chaotic rhythm of a normal windy day. The atmosphere suddenly feels controlled in a way that wind does not normally feel, the leaves rustle and ever so quietly the oak circle begins to hum ever so quietly, then raise their collective voices out from the canopy into the macrocosm beyond.
The song of the Mother Oak, whose heartwood center, when connected to the soles of the children’s feet, transmits a recognition whereby her twelve daughter trees, the Circle of Oaks, share their collective story, which starts here at the mother oak, the heart of these woods, the first tree of this forest. Here is the tale.
Nearly a thousand years ago, a tribe of nomadic indigenous people followed the buffalo and the mammoth before them, and would often camp on these lands, which were not a forest but rather grasslands, much like what this clearing is now, that stretched as far as the eye could see.
In those camps were always children who, as children do, collected treasures from their journeys; leaves, petals, rocks, bone, fossils, pinecones, and acorns. One of those children, while playing on this land, buried an acorn they had brought along from a far off forest leaving the memory of themselves behind as a token.The conditions that season and the seasons after were just right for the acorn to take root and slowly push its way above the ground becoming a sapling and then a sturdy young oak tree.
As the years went on, the oak made her own acorns. Wind, animal and child passing ensured many of those acorns were deposited and buried around the circumference of its leaves. Sometimes an acorn would try to grow too close to the original oak and couldn’t receive the proper sunlight needed and would soon die. But over the years as the oak grew and her canopy flourished, many of her acorns made it far enough away to root and grow and thrive in a perfect circle around her.
We are those daughter trees and are called the Circle of Oaks. We are the first descendants of the Mother Oak, upon whose heartwood you now stand. We too grew strong and interlocking roots with our mother and with each other and our acorns began to seed as well. The rain, wind and rich soil combined with birds nesting in our branches, all the woodland animals who made the protection of our growing canopy their home, and the people who passed through our small oak grove ensured our acorns seeded further and further beyond our canopies. In return, they brought with them seeds of other trees that when rooted found a strength to grow fully through interconnecting their roots with ours in natural reciprocity.
Over hundreds of years, this forest emerged from the seeding of that one acorn, our Mother Oak. An ecosystem of plants, insects, and animals of all kinds have evolved with the help of an underground waterway that runs from the mountains down through this land, offering us all the water that helps us thrive in the seasons when the rains are sparse. Every species of tree in the canopy, all of the understory shrubbery and new trees, and the low light plants and ferns on the forest floor are all connected through mycelial networks in our root systems, which lead to our Mother Oak who, for a long time, was the grandest tree in our forest.
“But what happened to her?” The siblings cried out in unison overcome with the majesty of the old Mother Oak, now a grand stump to which they both clung, pressing their cheeks to her offered heartwood center. The wind, as if on cue, whipped through the clearing and moaned, bearing their preemptive grief to all the forest who, in acknowledgement, returned a collective rustle and then a deep sigh into quiet stillness. The daughters continued their story.
One night, not so very long ago, a swift moving storm came through our woods. Mother Oak was the tallest, widest and largest of the trees in our forest. She emerged, out of the overstory, higher than all of us. The lightning bolt made no mark on the outer trunk; rather it struck part of her great core which became inflamed from within. Because we are a family of interconnected roots, the shock created an energetic pulse that flowed out through the roots of Mother Oak to her kinfolk across the forest floor. The mycelial network shared the call for help as a whole portion of her upper trunk and branches burned away from her core and fell to the forest floor. We sent her energy to survive as she has always done for us.
But over the next few seasons she grew weaker. The part of her that still stood had life but each year it was harder for her to thrive. So she started pushing her energy down through her root system and out to us, her first daughters, to offer strength and fortitude for a long life after she is gone. We trees of the forest, regardless of species, communicate and pass along energy in this way supporting one another in crisis and abundance. She gave her remaining energy to the trees that were her offspring, and beyond to the forest she nurtured to life. As an elder, she understood her responsibility and the reciprocity that the earth requires from us all. She taught us through her actions. And we teach you through our story.
Lessons in Humanity
By now the children were so attuned to the story of the Circle of Oaks that they were no longer hearing it but rather living it themselves as if they had embodied this journey and were just recalling the memory from long ago.
The land upon which this forest flourished for a thousand years had been occupied by people who created systems of ownership that no longer supported the indigenous ways, where the land belonged to herself and to all living beings who tread upon and grew from her. These new humans had forgotten their own lineage, whose ancestors once offered their original homeland gratitude in reciprocity. But that was long ago and memory only held for them the lineage of more recent devastating systems where they used the essence of the trees to document ownership in paper contracts holding power over rather than the natural ancient contracts of one mind in spirit bound by respect, responsibility and reciprocity.
In the times just after manifest destiny and land redistribution, a family came across this stretch of land, the circle, and the mother in the middle who was the biggest tree in the forest. They descended from far away lands and people. So many people ended up here, away from their ancestral lands, and forgot or often ignored that this land was stolen from the original stewards who knew that land belonged to only herself and no one else to begin with; that perpetual cycle of humans forgetting the consequences of claiming ownership thereby recreating the long ago trauma of their own homelands being stolen or misused and their sacred practices being deemed unholy. It’s an eternal revolution of macrocosmic disengagement from their deepest understanding of existence and humanity is living the consequences.
But in the microcosm, this family had been unsettling themselves through practices of grieving their ancestors' actions, listening mindfully and critically to those who were affected by those actions, and acting in ways that could begin to repair the collective damage of their lineage. Small actions ripple out.
They had relearned gratitude for the land and felt what a sacred and ancient place this forest was upon entering its embrace. As the family approached, the elemental spirits of this land remembered that long ago family whose child’s playful digging resulted in a planted acorn beginning an ecosystem. The spirits recognize soul kin, revealing the full magic of the land that only those who remember the old ways can feel.
All humans have the capacity to remember but so many are not ready to be still and listen. But this family, 3 generations together, had been listening and knew this forest home of ours was special. So they began a ritual of returning to spend time with us often. The children of the family created field journals to document the forest, the circle, and especially the mother oak. We, the daughter oaks, sensed that these children could connect to the pulsing life beneath the Earth and would be open to listening to the story of these woods. We, like the elemental spirits of the land, recognized soul kin too; a lineage of responsibility, reciprocity and story coursing through the veins of the family, but most intensely in the children, mirroring our underground mycelial veins connecting the trees. And so we shared our story with them. Each year upon the family’s return to the circle, the children filled their journals with sketches, stories heard in the wind, and bits of nature pressed between pages.
Mother Oak’s decline allowed for the sun to shine more directly upon the forest floor so that on a sunny still day, one could mark the shadows mirroring moon phases. Upon first discovering the circle, Mother Oak provided a half moon’s shade. That was a sharp contrast from her former prolific foliage glory, which once held the sun completely at bay offering dense understory new moon shade. Now she only could offer a simple crescent’s worth of cool respite. As the sun shown nearly full upon the ground for the first time in generations, the soil remembered the ancient grasslands that were here once upon a time and held the seeds of wild flowers and prairie grasses as the wind and animals carried them to the clearing to be nurtured under the new brighter conditions. The children noticed how, within the circle clearing, the forest floor changed from mossy fern covered stretches of the year's fallen leaves composting back into soil to the increasingly sunny circle of wild grasses, flowers, and medicinal herbs.
Meanwhile, the elders in the family continued relearning themselves in community and modeling the ancient precepts and principles of the land they now inhabited; to honor the land, the water, and all life just as the First Nation people of this land continue to teach and remember. The family was disrupting a universal pattern of truth: Whatever we don’t heal through remembering and accountability, we tend to recreate. The colonial ancestors of the family had tried to erase indigenous teachings of this land because they had forgotten the indigenous teachings of their own ancient ancestors long ago. But DNA never really forgets and these people were in deep practice of unsettling and listening through heart-centered unconditional love which always leads to remembering, grieving, repair, and healing of the lineages forward and backward.
Over a lifetime of ritually returning to the Circle of Oaks, by the time the children had grown into adults themselves, the forest, the circle, the mother tree, and the connective human community were sacred family. Many had moved to be near to this sacred forest and to dedicate a life’s work within the forest’s soul kin community to ensure the land continued to be her own by bringing her under an Indigenous Community Land Trust, an effort led by the original descendants of the land and supported by the newer descendants of this land who had been learning about their responsibility to follow the seventh fire prophecy on the green path. The community made the land trust decision through a consensus model used by the oldest democracy on earth, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, founded on respect and reciprocity central to the principles of the Honorable Harvest.
Table for All
Once the land was in the Trust of her original stewards and the community who loved her, they had to make another big decision.
Led by the visual decline of the Mother Oak, the data from years of observation and care including the collection of field journals by the children over many years, and a soul understanding of regenerative spirit, the community gathered around and encircled the, once grand now increasingly dwindling, Mother tree. It was clear that she had pushed as much energy as she could out to her beloved daughters and beyond. She was simply not going to sustain for much longer. As they circled her, they sang, held and hugged her and asked her permission to practice the Honorable Harvest what was left of her ancient wood to make a huge round table that would sit in the center of the building where the community taught about how to live in respect and reciprocity with the land. They would leave her stump as a monument; her heart center and her rings showing the years of elderhood as the eternal center and beginning of this beloved forest. They asked to create another Circle of Oaks with her Mother Oak table at the center, where humans come from all over the world to gather, remember and practice the honorable harvest, consensus, and gratitude for the balance of our intersovereignty; utterly bound together and yet radically our own individuated beings.
The Circle of Oaks is a place for community to gather and remember the ancient ways through the telling of story. Her table is a place in which to gather to imagine a world where all life is cared for, where practices are created and shared out through human networks that mirror the very mycelial threads that grew a forest from her single acorn.
As the beloved community circled Mother Oak, so her daughters circled the beloved community. A request of reciprocity came through from the land to the people. “Care for this forest that encircles the Circle of Oaks. Care for the clearing; the grasses, wildflowers and herbs that were here when this forest was a grassland.” The people promised to keep the forest wild, magical, and free; that a winding path would always be clear through the understory where anyone who is soul kin could discover the beloved Circle of Oaks and the Mother Tree at the center, the heart of this wood.
“That’s what we have done!” said one child to their sibling who responded by laying their head on the heartwood center and offering beloved gratitude for this transmuted learning, this knowing that had enriched their souls and entwined them with the soul of the forest.
Then Mother Oak spoke to the children directly, from her heart to theirs, telling them how the story ends.
I knew the community we had nurtured to care for our forest was true. I responded to their honorable request through the forest itself, the wind, the shining sun, and the energy still within my roots, breathing into their deep soul knowing a resounding “YES!” All these years later, only those who are soul kin find our enchanted Circle of Oaks because part of the protective magic of the forest and of the community’s safekeeping, in a world still not quite ready for true care of the land, is a spell upon our forest where only soul kin can find the path leading to our Sacred Circle, where we began from a child’s imagination and a buried acorn seed whose heartwood birthed an ecosystem upon which whose epicenter you stand.
The siblings listened as their soles stood rooted to the heartwood, their souls bound together to the soul of the forest, forehead to forehead swaying with the trees.
As they walked back along the path out of the woods, they gave thanks for the elementals of the land, the Circle, Mother Oak, and the medicinal story of soul kinship.
Upon return to their own home and family, they told their mama the story of their day in the forest.
“Do you think we should write it down?” asked the youngest.
“Yes,” said Mama as she snuggled them both into her. “Write, speak, share your stories. That is how you change the world, my loves.”
And so if you are here, experiencing this story, you too are soul kin to the forest, the Circle of Oaks, the Mother Oak, the siblings, the elemental land, and the Divine. What stories do you have to tell? We are waiting to hear them. Go change the world.
