The feeling starts around noon with a tugging in my solar plexus chakra, a drawing forward. The woods and the energy are telling me there's work I could be doing, connections to be made. I tell Jenny that I'm going out in the woods and that I'll be back before nightly barn chores. My intuition never gives me definitive plans, just as a river can't tell you its path but sometimes you hear the crashing of a waterfall ahead. I get only fleeting glimpses and notions of what I need to do: I should take my journal; I'll bring a knife and flint to start a fire; I'll need my Bluetooth headphones. The trail is all slush and mud but I'm soon drawn away from the path by a grove of hemlocks. Soaked moss quiets my footsteps but dead branches snap. I see plenty of nice places to sit, but none of them are correct until a certain bristle of upturned roots catches my attention. As the tree fell, the roots had rotated with it until they formed a two-foot-high semicircle, a small version of my more established root circle elsewhere in the woods. This is where I’ve been drawn to today.
I start by setting down my things and feeling the energy of the place: it’s light and blue but the hemlocks all around are very grounding and comforting. I go about gathering dry wood for the fire. The easiest and driest pieces are the lower hemlock branches, long since abandoned as the trees grew taller and sprouted newer, more productive limbs closer to the sun. Like abandoned hobbies, these lower branches ceased to be nourished. They grew dry but refused to fall, for they were once important. We all do this: we develop habits and gather material things that help us greatly, but we don’t know when to let go and they become detritus in our lives, always there but no longer useful. Although the trees no longer need these branches, the process has prepared the branches perfectly for fire making. Making a natural fire (no artificial accelerants or materials) inherently brings one into communion with nature. You have to listen to the branches break to find the driest; you have to work your fingers into the dirt and rocks to prepare a suitable fire platform; you have to feel the movement of air so the fire will have enough oxygen but not blow away recklessly. Once all the materials are ready, I set steel to flint above a bed of birchbark shavings. Within a few minutes flames are crackling, and I’m able to sit back off of my wet knees and wait for whatever comes next.
As I sit, listening to the trees and the fire, my phone rings. In situations like these I tend to ignore most incoming messages, but as I reach into my pocket I realize that this is what I’ve come here for. It’s Jessie, my step-mother, which is unusual since Dad is typically the one to call. I answer the phone: “Hey! How’s it going?”
“Oh hi honey, I was looking at all those wonderful pictures on your Facebook but now I’ve lost them and can’t get them back!” She sounds distraught.
“Oh yeah, of course I can help with that!” As I guide her through finding the hundred-odd photos of the farm I had recently uploaded, she tells me more.
“We were looking through all of them and I was just telling your dad how wonderful they are and how you see such beauty in the little things just like I do. Just the other day I stopped to admire the weather and I tried telling your dad but I couldn’t find the words. So many people just don’t look around and appreciate these things!”
“I know, right!?”
“And I’ve been having these terrible nightmares lately and then I saw your pictures.” As we talk more I can feel her start to calm down, but there’s still something bothering her. She tells me about how her and Dad have had a friend of his from up North staying in their driveway for a while now. She’s glad that they can help him through some tough times, but it’s been hard on her. “The other day I had just about had it! We were talking and he kept going on about how bad he’s had it. I tried telling him about my life but he just kept going on about how no one can understand his stuff and how it was so much worse. And he’s always hanging around being so negative about everything!”
“Oh yeah, so he was playing the ‘whose tragedy is worse’ game? That really sucks, and it never makes anyone feel better. People do that because they feel it’s the only way they can adequately convey how bad they’re feeling.” She vents about how he sits in his depression and has become toxic to be around, nearly refusing to talk about anything else. She talks about her pain and exhaustion, her frustration and inability to get away since the guy is staying in their driveway. We agree that it’s wonderful that Dad always wants to help people, but that you can’t always bring other people’s pain and toxicity into your own home and let it infect you.
As she lets go of all of this energy, I take it and allow it to channel through me and into the fire that is still popping and steaming in front of me. The fire transmutes it into useful energy, cleaning and releasing it back into the world, once again pure and flowing. An hour later she has put me on speaker so I can talk to Dad as well, and it’s lighthearted and easy before we hang up. My fire has been reduced to a pile of white coals; there’s no reason to keep feeding it with wood or energy for it has served its purpose.
The sun has gone down and dusk is deepening so I spread the fire’s ashes and start walking towards home. I’m glad that I listened to the universal energy telling me to go to the woods so that I could be in a healing place for myself and so that I could help those I love. I think about how much healing the world needs and how thankful I am to play a small part in that healing. As I walk, the woods put an idea in my head to sleep in the large root circle overnight for in-depth energy work; I should do that soon. I detour along the less frequented side of our property, admiring the dried grass and deer trails. There’s not always a profound release of energy the way there was today, but I’m endlessly fascinated by the grace I feel when I surrender and let everything flow.
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