Enosburgh Essences

The Story of How the Plants Changed My Life

Part I: Before. Grey Me.

For a long time in my twenties and thirties, when I was getting my PhD but not spending a lot time writing it, I felt like my life had no purpose.

Through those long years of study, I mostly wanted to hide. I kept up my studying because it was a good way to stay in the shadows. I would find little nooks in the library where I wouldn't be seen.

I lived in a small apartment in the city. It was someone else's apartment. In this urban environment, I smelled only disappointment and futility. As I rode my bike through exhaust fumes and traffic to teach for a minimal salary, I felt intensely alone. I focused on discipline, feeling that I had to be somehow different than I was. I wrote but only for myself since I felt ashamed of who I was. I wanted to be different, but mostly I felt sorry for myself.

I strove to be elsewhere, always elsewhere, but I didn't know where I wanted to go. I longed for the mountains, but I only ever saw them on the horizon. I tasted the scrape of concrete when I fell of my bike, which tore my clothes. Sometimes I drank too much.

I wanted to be in someone else's life. I saw things in black and white. My relationships were painful and unsatisfying. I faced rejection upon rejection. I was second choice and then third and then no one chose me at all for a long time. I could tell partners and potential partners sometimes felt pity for me. I often felt like I was being used. I couldn't feel the love that was offered to me when someone tried, yet I felt worthless because I didn't have a partner or a child.

Sometimes I imagined I was outside of myself entirely, peering in, as if I could shape something else out of my life, as if I could be Pygmalion and sculpt myself anew, but often I didn't have the wherewithal to even continue moving forwards. I didn't see the point. Every day was a chore. I had to pick myself up off the floor and keep going remotely, like a robot.

As I mechanically moved through my life, I saw no way that I fit in. I tried to fit myself into the work that was required of me, or the work I thought was needed of me. I strove to be useful, yet I fought for something that was always on the horizon, always out of reach, that I could never complete.

Mostly I was always other to myself, only seeing a grey me. I didn't like myself and I couldn't see my gifts or imagine that anyone else would want them or appreciate them. I didn't feel good at being human.

I was creative, I sang and danced, but when I heard the sounds of other people's voices I felt they were superior to me. I couldn't place myself on a pedestal that I only created for others, so where was my creativity? I stuffed it into discipline and strove to be an intellectual so that people might listen to me, but they didn't. I stifled myself with the judgments I imagined other people had.

Does this sound familiar? Do you sometimes feel ungrounded, stifled, outside of yourself? Grey?

In my next installment, I'll offer a bit of color. I'll tell you about an encounter with a tree.

Part II: The Trees of Home

This episode begins with the discovery that I could talk to trees. I saw a book on tree communication for sale at my local post office. At first I talked to them in secret, and I found that trees were friends to me. They spoke to me in words, clear as a voice in my ear. I always felt reassured and enlightened by what they told me.

Mostly they told me I was loved. They brought me away from my mind and my worries; they grounded me. A Linden tree in the garden of the University reminded me that he would always be with me. I walked by him every day and he had become my special friend. He reminded of other trees, the Apple Tree I had known since childhood, a forest of Maples I used to walk through in Vermont.

Grounded, I was brought back to memories of plant connection, and memories of home. It was as though this tree, unselfishly, was reminding me of how to go back to my roots, to go home. What was I doing roaming around the world when I knew where I needed to be? An old land wanted to hold me. A place where I could trust the energies of the land and just be held by green hands. A place where I could be me, where I was always already me.

Part III: Rigidity

The trees of home called to me, but how could I get home? 

I felt like I had spent my whole life traveling. I defined myself that way. I felt handicapped in my ability to put down roots. Ironically, this meant that I wasn't free. There was someone else I needed to be, always someone outside of myself looking in, someone who would never be satisfied. I could never set her free. 

I had a dissertation to finish. I kept applying to jobs, waiting for other people to want me. I felt despondent with rejection as time after time I was told I was not good enough. I was not what they wanted. My personal relationships reflected the same thing. In both areas of my life I was often told I was too "much." No one wanted me. 

I had no idea how to get past how stuck I was. With my feet immobile in the mud, I was unable to grow. I saw no way out of my situation. I smelled disappointment on my own breath. I heard only other people's criticism. I was numb to kindness, to touch. 

I wanted to go to the land for answers but I only found despair there, caused by my sense of ecological devastation. My skin prickled in anticipation of the magic I could create, but I walked slowly and trudged through life as if my habits were more weighty and pwerful than any new insights the light, green plants could give me. 

I felt encumbered by my inability to function in a society I didn't agree with, as if there was no room there for me. I struggled to imagine a life that I could feel purposeful in, that could hold me in the way I wanted to be held. Mostly I wanted nothing to do with reality as I perceived it. 

I knew I needed to finish my degree, leave the country I was living in, and set myself free from the expectations that some invisible hands had placed on me. But how then to fit in? I didn't want to be a slave to a system I didn't believe in. Yet how could I survive being always on the outside looking in? 

I wasn't sure, but I knew I needed to look for answers in other places than the academy, than intellectual analysis and the rigidity of approved answers to life's questions. 

I needed to return to the trees.

Part IV: Back to the Trees

In the last years of writing my dissertation, I decided I would go for a long walk to mark my completion of it. I wanted to turn to the Earth for some of the answers I was looking for. I wanted to ask her about the ecological despair I felt. I decided to walk across Scotland, because, besides being gorgeous, green and expansive, it was the land of my ancestors. I felt deeply connected to the land when I was there. 

The answers that I found were ones of deep resources and faith in life. This walk, which you can read more about here, gave me the encouragement I needed to listen to the messages I was receiving from the trees and to strive to share them. I learned that I needed to trust these messages, the voices of the trees, and allow them to guide me in my next steps in life. I needed to dig deeper into my earthly journey.

I also realized that I was not broken. What was broken was humanity's connection to the land. This had resulted in deep pain and disconnection in my own life but also in the lives of everyone around me. This disconnection was literally killing life and changing the very make up of the planet. The Earth was not concerned with her own survival though, she was concerned with ours. 

I talked to Oak trees on that walk, Oak trees that hold the very Earth we walk on and keep the land together. Oak trees who, because of their interconnections, can speak to us from anywhere at any time. They spoke to me of those that were too far out of their reach to be helped, of humans that could not be brought back to their innate connection to the Earth and all her life. But they also showed me how, just as their small families grow from acorns to survive and reproduce, there were people on Earth who wanted to reconnect to the land and that these people could learn to live in community again, to care for each other and the Earth. 

They told me that I could help them by teaching plant connection and helping people relearn the universal language that all things on Earth spoke. They told me that I was not here to be a language teacher in the traditional sense - I'd taught English for many years and now teach French - but that I needed to teach people to talk to plants. I was not supposed to serve human communication and the corporate society and destructive economy human language had forged, but to remind people to communicate with flowers. 

As crazy as this seemed, I began to think I could do this, though I still did not know how. I knew I somehow had been given the tools to help people remember their connection to the Earth. I understood that many of these life forms were in fact relying on me to get their messages across and to communicate the interconnectedness of all life forms on Earth to those who were ready to hear it. 

A daunting task? No doubt, but nothing is impossible when the flowers help you do it.

Stay tuned for Part V!