In the forest is a world and the world is life

metaphors for becoming elder

Reagh

Hello and welcome friends, familiar and new. I’m Jan and I live in a house that we are renovating in a hamlet in a forest. I hold spaces for those on journeys of transformation. I believe story is powerful and that the earth offers healing through our daily connection and herbal allies. Let’s create a little alchemy together. You are so welcome here. My Sunday posts are always free and you may find it easier to read online as some email clients have a length limit.

I'm currently travelling to see family and for work, away from the forest that has been my home for almost four years, but still feels like somwhere new. It's wonderful to be visiting loved ones and I'm excited to return to North Wales for a live launch later in the month. But away from the forest I miss it. I miss the way it's been forming an elderhood I never expected. I'm still surprised to be living in a foreign country, about to qualify as a herbalist, holding space for writers and creators on their transformative journeys.

The forest a place of lush greenness, birdsong, vocal owls at night, deer and wild boar. It's a  place where the foxes (that eat the mice on which deer ticks breed most) are so over-hunted that Lymes Disease has become endemic. It's a place of contradictions, like most places. A place of growth and change that feels like a good space for wondering how to live well and age well in a world of too much darkness and loss, yet still full of joy

I've thought a lot about change over the last four years. We arrived here during the pandemic, a whisker ahead of a lock down. An house move, even without Covid and isolation, can send seismic waves though life and there were also other new things happening. I arrived towards the end of my aromatherapy training and part way through a herbal apprenticeship and then training as a yoga nidrā teacher. All of these changed my perspective on work and wellness and the urgency of rest in our lives.

Since then I've almost completed my herbal practioner training and my work with writers has deepened considerably. I entered my sixties (the seventh decade of my life) in the first full year here in the forest and my writing is more than ever focussed on becoming a different story. 

Change feels increasingly organic and embodied but with any transformation there are also things that have to be left behind and let go of. Regeneration involves shedding and recycling as well as new shoots.

I'm sure I'n not alone in finding the process of change challenging, sometimes painful or confusing. But I've found mentors for change in the forest. 

The trees embody a cyclical wisdom that moves from blossom to leaf to seed to letting go. They are completely in tune with the soil, rooted in their own bodies and the body of the earth. They  know how to turn towards the light and how to withstand the darkness. 

The forest is a place of ceaseless change and yet it is also a place  where time seems to run differently. Here I've learnt again to linger and put myself in the way of kairos, ripe time rather than the relentless chronos of clocks and productivity.

In Rebecca Solnit's wonderful book, Orwell's Roses, she takes a detour to visit six eucalyptus trees planted by Mary Ellen Pleasant, who was born as an enslaved person and became a key figure in the Underground Railroad and a civil rights activist. Solnit comments:

There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes  calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs. 

[...]

The trees made the past seem within reach in a way nothing else could: here were living things that had been planted and tended by a living being who was gone, but the trees that had been alive in her lifetime were in ours and might be after we were gone. They changed the  shape of  time.

[...]

Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.

There's a dual lesson here. Yes, everything changes. But change and growth don't have to be about striving, pushing and exhausting ourselves. We can process change, like the trees, by rooting ourselves (even if only for a while) on a piece of good earth and trusting the rhythms and cycles of time. We can grow as we let go of what needs to be composted. And we learn about the stretch of time that is so much more than our lifespan. These trees have seen so much. Some of the ash and poplar at the far end of the garden saw this 200-year old house built — saeculum that give a different perspective on age.

In this seventh decade I'm concerned with the ancestor I will become — even if that's some way in the future. Writing at world's end, begin, in 2021, a sequence of haiku grounded in the land we had moved to, I did a lot of thinking about the ancestors of this place and the ancestors I carried with me. And writing the novel that is based in another house in a forest in a not-too distant future has also given me a lot of opportunity to think about elderhood. About what we are passing on to today's children.

In the novel, a post-pandemic community in a forest hamlet gather for the Summer Solstice. One of the herbalists is amongst the most satisfying characters I've ever written. At 93 she is a serious elder — elegant, gracious and with a gift for listening deeply, so that when she speaks it is with gentle but powerful wisdom.

The forest in the novel mirrors much about the one I live in. It's the place where I'm slowly unravelling the alchemical moments that have led me here. A journey that is about what I or any of us can offer to our hurting world at all stages of our life-journey.

It’s a place where I'm exploring what it means to honour bonds — to my beloved, to my family around the globe, to the place we have come to dwell in and to the work I do with writers and those seeking healing from the plants. It’s a place that is asking me to go to the farthest borders of myself where all the cusp moments that have sculpted me cohere.

'The word for world is forest,' Ursula K. Le Guin insists in her eponymous novella in which humanity wreaks havoc on another planet, introducing slavery that results in the planets' inhabitants taking on the human propensity for violence. Any ecosystem is a delicate and complex balance. And forests are extraordinary models of the connectivity that involves every scrap of life on our planet. 

Trees are more rooted than us restless humans, as Ursula Le Guin points out in her poem 'Kinship', yet none of us can escape the fact that everything we do makes a difference to other lives.

Kinship

Very slowly burning, the big forest tree
stands in the slight hollow of the snow
melted around it by the mild, long
heat of its being and its will to be
root, trunk, branch, leaf, and know
earth dark, sun light, wind touch, bird song.

Rootless and restless and warmblooded, we
blaze in the flare that blinds us to that slow
tall, fraternal fire of life as strong
now as in the seedling two centuries ago.

If the word for the world is forest, perhaps the word for growth and the analogy for elderhood is ‘tree’.

Becoming an elder for the love of others

Becoming an elder for the love of the land that loves us.

Becoming an elder who loves this life, despite its shadows and darknesses.

Who is the ancestor you want to become?

What are the metaphors that inform your journey?