ITCT_INTRODUCCION

INTRODUCTION

I remember exactly when I first began talking to trees: it was in May 2015. A couple of years prior, I had started getting weekly Akashic Records emails from my friend Vickie Young, and it was one of her messages that sparked a new chapter in my life and ultimately led to the creation of this project. The Akashic Records are an extensive library of energetic records of all souls, including their past, present, and possible future lives. It includes all events, thoughts, words, emotions, and intentions ever to have occurred in these past, present, or possible future lives. It’s like an archive of each person throughout all their lifetimes. It is thought that each soul has its own Records, like a set of encyclopedias where each book in the set represents a single lifetime. It’s the history — and future — of you, as a soul.

These Records can be quickly and easily accessed in a variety of different ways. There are plenty of training programs available online, and author Linda Howe shares in her books a simple prayer that she uses to access the Records. That’s how I first learned to access the Akashic Records myself, and it’s how I continue to do so today.

Even though I know how to access my own Records, I rarely take the time to do it, which is why I greatly value the weekly messages that I get from Vickie. They’re short and focused, and they often provide a starting point for my journaling and mindset work each week. I’ve been getting them on and off since 2013, and they’re a very important part of my personal development work. On this particular week, back in May 2015, I received the following message from Vickie and my Records Keepers:

This week Holly, when you are on your sacred walks, take a moment and listen to the plant spirits. They have so much to tell you and they want to share with you their knowledge of the medicine that plant people have for you and for others.

Hold your hands on a tree (you know, The Tree!) and just listen for a voice in an unexpected way. Feel the energy of the tree and notice how it is waking up and moving inside. Feel the energy of the tree inside of your body and notice that a chakra stirs up.

Notice this on each plant that you hold. You see...each plant that you come in contact with will have a healthy influence and message for you. All you have to do is listen and believe!

To be honest, I was a bit skeptical when I read this email. “Me? Talk to trees? I don’t know how to do that,” I thought. But later that week, when I went on my weekly Nature walk, I had the opportunity to give it a try when I got lost in the woods. In fact, I got lost so many times, I turned an 11.6 mile (18.6 km) walk into a 16.7 mile (26.8 km) walk. I was on a route from Milford to Haslemere in Surrey, England, and I was following the directions that I had printed out. I didn’t have a map with me, which was not unusual at the time because, at this point in my life, I often went walking without a map. Later, I would go on to do more training in outdoors leadership and navigation, and I became much more careful on my walks: always walking with a paper map and compass for navigation, with the OS Maps app on my phone as a backup.

But back in 2015, I was a bit reckless. I did most of my walking in the lowlands of Surrey, which always felt like a safe environment to wander around in. Unlike in the hills of California — where I grew up — in Surrey, there were no bears, mountain lions, or rattlesnakes to worry about. It always felt relatively harmless, which had led me to put caution to the side when I went out walking.

Before I got lost for the first time that day, I remembered my weekly message from the Records Keepers, and I stopped to connect with the trees. I walked up to one at random, and I put my hands on its bark. I immediately heard the message: "It's okay." The words sounded clearly in my head, in a calm, male voice. I remembered to focus on my chakras, as the message from my Records Keepers had suggested, and I felt movement in my throat center as the energy shifted. It made sense that my fifth chakra would be activated, as I was focusing on communication with the trees. The fifth energy center, or throat chakra, is the one that’s related to communication and expression.

I was confused by the tree’s message: “It’s okay.” What did that mean? That was all the tree had to say to me, and at that point, I didn't understand what it meant. I assumed that I must have gotten something wrong, and that I was missing another part of the message. After all, I was new to this tree communication thing. I went to another tree, hoping to get more information, but it repeated the same message, albeit in a different male voice. Once again, I felt movement in my throat chakra. It was as though new avenues of communication were stirring within me, yet I couldn’t understand what the trees were actually trying to tell me.

Their message wasn’t clear (or so I thought), but I resolved to continue on my walk and try again later. I assumed that because I was new at tree communication, I either wasn’t getting the full details, or I didn’t understand the words I had been given. However, I would soon understand that “It's okay” was all I needed to hear for me to know exactly what action to take next.

Walking along a dirt trail through a wood, I noticed that it appeared to be a commercial forest. The trail was deeply grooved in places where heavy load vehicles had left their mark, and the woodland was made up of a sea of identical conifers. I don’t usually like walking through such places, as they feel strange and unnatural to me, but it was a beautiful day, and I felt light-hearted and joyful as I explored the new route. I continued uphill along the trail, soon coming out of the wood into an open area full of low-growing heather, yellow flowering gorse, and lush green bracken. Consulting my printed directions, I turned left. Unfortunately, I hadn’t clearly identified where I was on the page as it compared to where I actually was on the trail, and I turned left where I should have continued on the main path as it curved around to the right, eventually turning left further on.

I happily continued straight down the trail until it closely approached the noisy A3 road and turned right. This is where I realized I was lost. When I attempted to retrace my steps, I got even more lost. I hadn’t seen another walker in over an hour, and there was no one around I could ask for directions…or so I thought.

I was on open access land, which meant that there were many little trails going off in all directions, and no public footpath signs to be found. I had no idea where I was or how to get back on track, and I felt really confused. This is probably the point in the story where I should explain that I have high functioning autism — formerly known as Aspergers — and if I don’t make a conscious, focused effort to stay calm in emergency situations I can often spiral into a meltdown. When that happens, all common sense goes out the window and I panic. I could feel myself heading toward a meltdown as I struggled to figure out where exactly I was and where I needed to go to get back on the right path.

A simple phrase popped into my mind: “It's okay.” I remembered what the trees had said just a few minutes prior, and at last, their message made sense. Everything was okay. I just needed a little help to get me back on track. I went up to a slender young birch tree and put my hands on its trunk. I asked it where I needed to go to get back on track, and it gave me a very clear answer. It told me which direction I needed to start off in, and where I needed to turn left, then left again to get back on the main trail.

The birch was right, of course. From there, I quickly and easily got back on the right track, and I soon found my way out of confusion and back onto the route I had been following. I felt fantastic: the solution had been so simple! I was so grateful for the guidance that I thanked the trees out loud as I walked. I was also thankful that it was a weekday, and there were no other walkers in sight to hear me as I spontaneously and effusively thanked the forest for its knowledge. It was almost unbelievable how I had gone from total disorientation to absolute knowing, thanks to the simple instructions from the birch.

A new chapter in my life had begun.

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This experience gave me a new awareness of the trees that I passed as I went on my walks: they had wisdom that I could easily access by simply striking up a conversation and asking them a question. Yet it wasn’t until almost three years later — in January 2018, when I was on a Forest Bathing and Nature Therapy Meetup — that I deepened my connection with the trees even further. After a delightful afternoon of smelling, tasting, and engaging in completely new ways with the forest at Newlands Corner in Surrey, the group was guided to enter an ancient grove of yew trees. We were told to select one of the trees and then connect with it.

I instantly knew which one I needed to work with: it was a yew that had caught my eye off to the right-hand side of where we were standing in the grove. I walked straight to the yew, and I put my hands on its bark to make first contact. I then leaned in to hug the tree as I greeted it. I felt an instant connection to the yew, and he immediately began to speak to me.

The ancient yew acknowledged that he knew I was having trouble with the novel I had been working on at the time, my first work of fiction. It was slow moving, a struggle: I had always found writing nonfiction books to be easy, but fiction was a whole other story. I was learning a new skill, and it was very slow going and not at all fun. The yew suggested that I set aside the novel and instead, write a different book: a book of tree stories, in which I would  connect with trees in the same way that I was connecting with him, and they would share their stories with me.

“This is your work,” the yew said, “to share our wisdom.”

He made it clear to me that it was my job to help people connect to Nature, and to help rebuild the love and respect that humanity used to have for the Earth. He said that this was the way of the future; that this was one way to help the environment. It wasn’t enough to conserve water and other resources; humanity needed to rebuild its relationship with Nature. He said that this book would be a piece in the puzzle of what was necessary to help rekindle the deep and healthy relationship that humanity once had with Nature.

The yew acknowledged that I might need to “wrap it in a package” that would make the stories easier for people to digest: that perhaps the book would need to be marketed as fiction so that it could reach a wider audience. Many truths can be shared in fiction, and he suggested that perhaps the tree stories would be better received by readers if they thought they were made up. Or that maybe it would need to be marketed as a children’s book: he reminded me of the Madeleine L’Engle quote “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

I took his advice and toyed around with the idea of writing this book as fiction: an eleven-year-old girl goes into the forest and gets one story from each of the Ogam trees. The Ogam — often spelled Ogham — is an early alphabet that has been identified as the earliest written record of the old Irish language. The original alphabet was comprised of twenty letters, with a further five added at a later date. Now, it is sometimes used by druids and other pagan groups as a form of divination, with each letter symbolizing a tree, which in turn represents a message. The twenty trees of the Ogam are birch, rowan, alder, willow, ash, hawthorn, oak, holly, hazel, apple, vine, ivy, reed, blackthorn, elder, silver fir, gorse, heather, poplar, and yew. My idea all sounded very neat and tidy, quite unlike how this book turned out.

In this initial plan, I would enter the woods myself, collecting the stories, and I would put it all together as if it were a novel. I suspected that the yew was right, and this might help the book to reach a wider audience: that of people who were open to the concept of tree-talk but in a magical, fictional setting. Not everyone will accept the idea of a person who talks to trees, and the yew had made it very clear to me that it was important for me to help them by bringing their stories to the widest possible audience of readers.

Yet presenting this as a work of fiction didn’t quite feel right. I detest lying, and I’m extremely uncomfortable with half-truths. After months of going back and forth and worrying about what to do, I decided to simply tell the truth: yes, I talk to trees. Yes, these are their stories. No, this is not a work of fiction.

I wasn’t fully comfortable with this decision, mostly because of my fears around what people would think of me. Throughout the year I found myself evading conversation around the topic of the book I was working on. I feared judgment, and only my closest friends knew the full truth of the contents of this book. Yet I knew that this was the right thing for me to do: I had to be honest about exactly where these stories had come from.

Because, let’s be honest: whether or not you believe that people can actually talk to trees — and hear their replies — there’s a lot more power to these messages if you know the truth of this book, which is that the stories were actually given to me by the trees. I didn’t make this stuff up. It isn’t a work of fiction. This is real. This is my truth, my experience, and I have chosen to share the unfiltered stories with you, just as they were given to me.

As I went on my weekly walks in Nature, various trees started to speak out to me: “I’m in your book,” some of them would inform me. If it was a cold or wet day, I would make a mental note to return and collect their story. Sometimes, if the weather was good, I would sit right down against the trunk of the tree and immediately connect with it to receive its tale. Several times throughout the year, it occurred to me that perhaps I should travel further from home to connect with some of the “superstar” trees in Britain: the most famous, ancient and gnarled trees that make their way into books and magazines. I thought of the Fortingall Yew, the Llangernyw Yew, and the Big Belly Oak of Savernake Forest. But that didn’t feel right: according to the Newlands Corner Yew, all trees have a story, and I had such an abundance of trees who were willing to share their wisdom with me that I decided to stick with the trees I knew. After all, I already had a relationship with them.

And this was a very important part of the journey of creating this book: building a relationship with the trees. While I’ve always loved trees for their beauty — as a child, I absolutely loved eating broccoli because I thought it looked like little green trees — I began to connect with them on a much deeper level, as individuals. I learned to think of them in the way I think of the different people in my life, and I started to feel like I knew them.

This wasn’t an easy process, though. Just because I was given a very clear topic for the book doesn’t mean that collecting the stories was a walk in the park (pun absolutely intended). Instead, it triggered all of my insecurities. Though I’ve been talking to trees since 2015, and I’ve been channeling spirit guides since the year before that, this book stretched me out of my comfort zone and forced me to grow both as a person and as a channel. Channeling is how I can best describe the method I used to collect these stories: it involves opening up a connection or line of communication, often to unseen or nonphysical beings such as spirit guides, angels, or ascended masters. You can channel your Higher Self, and you can also channel Nature spirits, such as the spirits of the trees who shared their stories in this book.

This book became a personal lesson in I am good enough, something that I’ve struggled with my entire life. It’s the theme that keeps coming up over and over when I do mindset work with myself to my clear fears, blocks, and limiting beliefs. I believe it’s one of the main topics that my soul chose to work on, develop, and clear in this lifetime. It’s one of the primary subjects in my personal school of life.

It didn’t help that the stories weren’t what I had expected: I thought I would receive a series of quaint and magical fairy tales, and what I actually got was very different…so much so that I worried that the stories might be a little too serious. I also struggled with the fear that my channeling skills weren’t good enough for me to receive the full tales, but rather only a superficial version of them…and that there was actually much more underneath the surface than I was able to tap into. The Newlands Corner Yew had given me a very serious task, and I wanted to do justice to the trees’ project. And to do so, I needed to believe that I was good enough to make it happen.