A little more of "The Grove"

... picking up from a previous post...

And so that is what they did. They dug a well. They never lowered buckets into it. They didn’t line it with stone. Its purpose was to allow the Heeders better to heed. Its purpose was to strengthen the relationship between the land-walkers and the land itself.

That first time they saw the oak, when they dug the hollow in the cold hard ground, the trees were just beginning to hint at the green to come. The angle of the sun had altered ever so slightly, a signal which always led the motherless man to walk with a swifter step. For he knew that before the next moon he would hear the songs of warblers (whom he knew as “the summer singers”) and the chattering of swallows (the Heeders referred to them as “speed weavers”). It was at this time, the time of the Third Moon, that they first heard the earth speaking to them from the seam beneath the oak.

And so they decided that every year, at the Third Moon, they would return to this peculiar place. They would perform a ritual not of petition or even of gratitude, but of exchange. As they sat, that first night, tired from their efforts, wet and muddied, gathered around a fire of seasoned fallen branches, their eyes warmly glowing in the light of the flames and their clothes gently steaming, they determined the form of the ritual, one then another of them going to the newly made hollow and leaning in to be sure that the Deep One was in agreement.

This was what they decided, after listening to the land.

They would come with something that spoke of their life over the past twelve moons. Perhaps a carved wooden object, a nut or a seed; perhaps a handful of soil from a place where they had been happy; perhaps something woven of reeds or a pebble from a clear stream. They would drop the objects into the well, not as offerings to a spirit but as a way of informing the land. As each Heeder left his chosen thing, he or she would say, “We are here. These are our stories. Tell this to the rivers, and the stones and the roots. Tell this to the birds and the insects, to the animals and the plants. Tell this to the secret bodies of the mushrooms. Tell this to the earth we rely upon, O Deep One.” And then they would lean in and listen, hearing the whispers of life in its hidden greatness. It would be a pact of communication rather than worship; of communion rather than praise.

And the oak would oversee all this, and would overhear. The oak, who gave generously in acorns, and fallen limbs for firewood, and homes for the small and the feathered and the many-legged, the oak would draw into its heartwood the heart-wisdom of the Heeders and the heart-health of the land.

This they did, until the youngest among them, that girl-child held in the arms of her mother, was old in bones and great in knowing.

Around the roots of the oak, the underground networks of fungi had thickened, drawn by the dense heart of the tree, drawn by the seam of water, drawn by the resonance of so many human stories dropped into the dark.

The birds and animals of the peculiar place had participated in this pact from the very start, for they had always sensed the life of the land and they always, at their deaths, gave their stories, with their bodies, willingly back to the earth that fed them.

The creatures most engaged in the ritual were the hares, known to the Heeders as “dancers of the Third Moon”.  One hare would always watch, amber eyes shining, and listen, broad ears attuned to every whisper. This messenger, through the glee and grace of their Third Moon dancing, would confirm that the communion was strong and the world was good. Above, the birds would sing the sweetness of the storied land into the sky and the winds would spread the news across the land. Below, the ancient rivers and the mycorrhizal elders shared the tidings. From this peculiar place, a kind of peace, a rich peace that included, of course, inevitable struggles and hardships, deaths and sadness, along with the vibrant creativity and joy of life, this kind of peace blossomed.

But, at that old woman’s death, some bond weakened.  Over generations, people forgot the ritual and they forgot to listen, though they remembered enough to treat the place with reverence. Then, later, as centuries passed, the original Heeders and their kind moved on or folded into other cultures.

Even so, the grove continued to grow.  The hollow remained, half-remembered and half-ignored.

The oak became ancient.

There were more people and less remembering. Time like wind wore away the sense of the sacred as the remembering weakened. And the land began to change. Storms became more violent. Floodwaters rushed down the hillside, loosening the old tree’s grip on its earth. The animals had changed. Gone were sharp toothed martins and the scimitar-clawed bears. Gone were the beavers in the valley and the wolves on the hill. And the birds sang with less rapturous abandon, for all the land seemed sadder than once it was.

And then, one night at the time of the Eleventh Moon, a storm split the oak down its centre. Both stems fell, but although one half died, the other, improbably, defiantly, survived, fed by the last secure connection to the earth that had nourished it for hundreds of years.

This rupture of roots from land, stem from stem, was a signal that something had changed in the relation between the land and those living upon it. When the stories stopped flowing between people and place, the land had sickened and the people too, though they didn’t know it. As winds, floods and droughts too swept the over-ground world, underground the mycorrhizal elders, saddened by the silence between beings, began their long retreat. Not a disappearance — a withdrawal. In the absence of communion, trust frayed.

The well stayed open, unseen, now almost fully forgotten, beneath the half-living tree that had long guarded it.

And, as it happened, the oak was guarding more that the Deep One’s hollow. The tree, a being in its own right, the first of its kind on this side of the hill, had been protecting its progeny and a ring of other trees, who had grown in the shelter and half-light around its canopy.  Fallen now, the circle of young oaks, with their companions, elder, alder, ash, birch, hazel, hawthorn and holly, reached with greater vigour into the increased light, as the downed limbs of the old tree – some alive, some dead – kept a protective sheath around them. The ring of trees and branches encircled a clear central space. Here, violets and cowslips, wood anemones and ransoms grew, shielded and secure. In this small centre, the old pact lingered.

This ring was an almost-promise: it was the land preparing itself for the possibility that the withdrawal might be reversed. The land was waiting, as it had awaited the Heeders. Someone, at some time, again would hear the whispering world of words beneath the surface. Someone, at some time, would tell the Deep One the stories that would regenerate a relationship. The aching earth knew that, one day, some person would come, a person who could sense the withdrawal not as a void, but as a direction.