Trees first appeared on the Earth around 385 million years ago. The oldest known non-clonal tree, a Bristlecone Pine, has lived for more than 5,000 years, whilst the oldest clonal tree group in Utah, has an astonishing estimated age of 80,000 years. Trees have played a significant part in the development of human consciousness. They have been woven into various mythologies, from the Kabbalistic ‘Tree of Life’, to the Nordic ‘Yggdrasil’ on which the god Odin hung for nine days to gain the knowledge of the runic alphabet. The Buddha attained enlightenment when meditating under a ‘Bodhi’ tree, and Florence Nightingale, felt called to God’s work, when sitting under a magnificent Cedar of Lebanon tree, which still stands to this day, in her home at Embley Park, Hampshire. We also know that a stroll in the woods reduces stress, blood pressure and strengthens the immune system. So what is the power that resides in trees, and in communicating with trees?
As a child, I can remember many happy hours climbing trees in a nearby forest, and I always loved being out in nature. However, it was not until the early 1990s that I first gained insight into their world. At the time, I was living near beautiful parkland in Surrey, UK, which I regularly visited. One day, while looking out over a tranquil lake, drinking in the beauty of the scene, I became aware of a voice in my head talking to me. Being psychically gifted as a child, such an experience was not uncommon, but it took me a little while to discover that the source of the ‘voice’ was a beautiful oak tree, close to where I was standing. I found that I could pose questions to this tree, which produced intriguing responses. I soon gathered that I was communicating with a ‘Mr’ tree, but close by was another oak tree, that was his ‘Mrs’. I began to dialogue with them both. It was rather like meeting a husband and wife team, similar but also very distinct.
Over the following weeks, I had many conversations, with both these two trees and others in the vicinity, where they told me something about their awareness and role within nature. They informed me that one of their primary methods of communication was through their roots. This snippet of information was long before science discovered the truth of this statement. They also stated that they could communicate through a form of telepathy with other distant trees around the planet, a kind of wood-wide-web. They too have their hierarchies, with ancient wise trees being the guardians of profound wisdom, which support the development of younger trees to channel healing energy to this planet. They do this by rooting it from the cosmos into the Earth. Interestingly, both humans and trees stand vertical to the Earth plane.
This information was fascinating stuff, but it reached a point where I began to wonder whether I was making it all up. After all, can trees really communicate with us telepathically in a language we can understand? And then one day, as so often happens in my life, I was talking with an Atlantic Cedar tree when it happened to mention that it had given some healing to a friend of mine. Think about this comment. How did the tree know this person was a friend of mine? Could it read my mind? The individual mentioned did live in the vicinity, but there must be hundreds if not thousands of trees close by, why this tree and this particular person? Be that as it may, this was a piece of information I could now check, and when the opportunity next arose, I happened to mention to this friend that a tree I had been communicating with had said it had given her some healing. She knew that I was into the ‘weird and the wonderful’, so my talk of tree communication was not challenged, and at the mention of healing her eyes lit up. She immediately identified the tree, explaining that after her husband died some eighteen months previously, full of grief, one day she had gone and sat under this same tree and spent many hours ‘sobbing her heart’ out. She felt that the tree had helped her release her pain. As this bit of information from the tree checked out; perhaps the rest was real. Soon after then, I moved away from the area, and although I continued to have occasional dialogues with trees, my life moved on in other directions.
Last year, as part of ‘Integrative Practice’ in the Master’s programme, I decided to renew my chats with trees, and in particular with a magnificent cedar tree close to where I live, standing in the grounds of Priory Park, Malvern. His name, (he is definitely a ‘Mr’ tree), is ‘Tengorn’, and he resides in front of Priory House, once owned by Dr Gully, famous for his Malvern ‘water cures’. Florence Nightingale came here in 1848 to recover from ‘Crimean Fever’.
There has been much that ‘Tengorn’ has shared with me over the past twelve months, on many different levels. I have come to recognise that ‘he’ knows far more about me and human beings than I know about him and the secrets of their world. Although rooted in one spot, his consciousness roams freely and widely. Whenever, I think of him, wherever I am, I can sense his presence and his willingness to communicate. I once asked him,
“Wouldn’t you have preferred to incarnate as a human being, as we have the freedom to move anywhere?”
“Certainly not,” came back his immediate response. “Human beings have boxes over their heads that stops them from seeing the spiritual life that is all around them. We do not have that problem. We can communicate with beings from many levels and dimensions. Nor are we tied to our physical structure as you suppose, but can move our consciousness at will around the Earth. I believe you call this an ‘out of body experience’.” Well, that response put me in my place.
As Tengorn suggests, we can all learn to communicate with trees, for they have much to teach us. It just takes a little patience and an open heart to listen to the messages they offer. Some of my dialogues with Tengorn and a few other beings can be found at the following link, which gives further insights into tree communication. http://www.davidfurlong.co.uk/communication.htm
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