Blog Post and Photos by Susan Beal
My husband and I are guardians and stewards of a piece of land that has been in my family for several generations. In Vermont, where I live, owners of large properties can enroll in a state program to significantly reduce their property tax burden. For woodlands, you must have a Forest Management Plan written up every ten years by a licensed forester. The plan has to include a certain amount of logging, as one goal of the program is to support Vermont’s rural economy through agriculture and forestry products.
We chose a forester recommended for his conservation approach and had a plan drawn up that we thought would minimize logging and prioritize habitat preservation in our 150 acres of woods. We met the loggers he chose for the job and were impressed by their knowledge and integrity. We walked through the woods to see what trees were marked for harvest. We let the trees know what would be happening, asked for their input, and sprayed a white X over the marks from any trees we didn’t want taken or we sensed shouldn’t or didn’t want to be harvested.
However, when the logging began, it was much more extensive than we’d ever imagined. For me, all kinds of difficult emotions rose up. I was grief stricken. I felt shame, as if I had failed in my responsibility to protect the woods I love. I felt angry and betrayed by the forester and doubted his integrity. I felt cynical about standards of forestry that require logging as part of a management plan—as if Nature couldn’t manage forests without human tinkering!
We were assured over and over again by our county forester and the forester who designed the plan that it was in keeping with our wishes, and that, in fact, it was consistent with the goal of cultivating old-growth characteristics in at least 20% of Vermont’s forests, where currently less than 2% of our woods can be considered old growth.
Several friends and neighbors railed against the logging, telling us that “trees should never be cut for human use!” or, “Logging is all about human greed,” or “that logging at your place is devastating the woods for generations!” We had equal numbers of neighbors and friends complimenting the logging, wanting to get in touch with the forester and loggers for their own properties.
The county forester insisted that all was well, and that despite the seeming chaos, this was exactly what needed to happen to return the woods to a state of true balance after generations of human meddling. Over a hundred years ago, Vermont's mountains were 80% bare, the trees having been cleared for agriculture, timber, mining, and quarrying. Today, much of the cleared land has returned to woodlands, forming a second-growth forest. Our forester reminded me that we’d embarked on a very long term recovery process of at least 300 years and more like 800 years. We must learn to think not just like trees, but like a forest ecosystem that measures time in centuries and millennia rather than seasons and years.
Reverence and appreciation for trees keeps growing, which is heartening. We’re beginning to understand their importance not only from an ecological standpoint, but from emotional and spiritual perspectives, as well. Forest bathing is an expanding wellness practice with scientific backing. Planting a tree is synonymous with ecological responsibility and concerns about climate change. Outcries are increasing over greedy, rapacious logging practices that have destroyed forest ecosystems the world over. The more confused I felt, the more the universe kept tossing tree-welfare information at me. I got emails from friends with links to books about tree consciousness or articles like, “Do Trees Scream When Stressed?”, or “Join the Tree Sisters to Save the World’s Trees!” A fellow in a local meditation group, a man of very few words, announced one day that there were only two things we needed to do for the world: “Plant trees, and don’t cut them.”
All of us use wood and paper products, so none of us are quite entitled to wash our hands of responsibility for logging. I pointed out as much to friends who questioned the logging in our woods. I blessed the loads of logs as they left the property, imagining the furniture and houses that would be built from them, and hoping that they’d retain a sense of connection to the land they came from. I checked in regularly with the woods to see if I needed to do any geomantic adjustments to help harmonize the energy.
One day, while stumbling through the woods along rutted skid trails, I was feeling more and more upset by the visual chaos of tangled branches and cut stumps. Trees I had used to orient myself by were gone. I realized I couldn’t possibly get an accurate read on the energetic and subtle effects of the logging until I quieted my emotions and listened to the trees, themselves. So I found a big, fresh stump, still oozing sap, and sat down on it. I calmed and centered myself, and, once I felt quiet, I felt the roots of the stump ground me deep into the forest floor.
I reached out to the trees and woods around me and I was surprised by the utter peacefulness, so at odds with my turbulent emotions and the disruption from the logging. I felt welcomed and embraced. The trees were not upset, but accepting of the logging, in fact—and this really surprised me—partners in it. I felt their appreciation for the connections we’d made with them during the process, which had allowed them to prepare and adjust in ways of their own.
I learned many things, some of which I already knew but that were good to be reminded of: that human emotion can greatly distort or block subtle communication, that trees don’t hold onto form or experience time the way humans do, and that the trees that had been cut were still present as energetic forms over-lighting their very-much-alive stumps, and still contributing, in an altered way, to the wholeness of the woods. The energetic trees seemed to have a different role than they’d had as physical trees, one that contributed in some way to the shift the woods were undergoing.
But more than that, I could feel the residue of Love everywhere in the woods—streamers and pools and skeins of it left there by the love of the foresters and the loggers for their work, men with a deep love and respect for trees. I could feel that the trees respected them in return and that they were actually partners in the logging, thanks to the mindfulness with which the management plan was crafted. I could also feel the love and appreciation of the hikers and skiers who used the trails that cross our property, and I felt as well the forest’s appreciation of my own and my family’s love for it. The woods knew me, and welcomed me, and did not see me, or the logging, or anything as separate from its communal wholeness.
This presence of Love as left by humans was very distinct, different from the energies of the physical and elemental beings who inhabited the forest. It was Love transmuted by its passage through human hearts and minds, a product of incarnate human experience. And I came to understand that it was very precious, a vital, potent ingredient that the trees and the spirit of the forest could use, like fertilizer, in creating a new wholeness out of the changes from the logging.
The trees made me understand that by being in communion with the woods while also becoming conscious, in my heart and mind, of the presence of human love lingering there, I was organizing and anchoring the Love, making it more available or assimilable to the landscape and the Spirit of Place.
Beyond that, I saw that this was true everywhere else in the world, wherever traces of human love can be found (and surely it can be found everywhere!) – in the woods, in a Walmart, at a tollbooth, an airport, an operating room, a public restroom, in one’s own bed at night.
This is the practice of Incarnational Spirituality, and our privilege as incarnate human partners of Gaia.