I was filming these red deer stags in front of me when I heard some young men say, “Excuse me!”. Being British, I apologised and then felt a tug on my hair… The men were trying to warm me that a well-antlered male was right behind me. The tug was him grabbing my hair with his tongue, as cattle do, and pulling. I moved, raised my hand, but the stag was pretty determined. I lost some locks. It can’t have tasted good. Not with all the product on it. Anyway, close encounters of the cloven-footed kind.
The meeting with the stags combined, again, with ancient oaks. I’d walked to Richmond Park from the studios and I though I was expecting to have a good tree day I hadn’t anticipated it would be quite so momentous.
Before I even got into the Park, I climbed a little way up a tree in a local wood. A woman came by and I said, “I’m going back to my childhood!” She looked at me and suggested which branch I should take to climb further and then told me about a tree just around the corner where all the local kids learned to climb. I followed her directions and saw a tree suffering from the compacting over his roots and perhaps not helped by being a climbing frame. The bark shone, polished smooth by hands and shoes. A young man walked past, and I said, “A lady told me all the kids learned to climb here!” He said, smiling, “I used to climb this tree!” I felt the tree’s warmth and welcome. The memories of all these little people holding, loving, feeling their bodies as their bodies felt the tree. The oak, as I followed generations of children, said, “This is what love looks like.”
And that felt like the message of the day. Holes in trees for birds and bees. Holes under roots for rabbits and stoats. I saw fences around some of the oldsters to protect their roots from frequent footfall. I saw logs and trunks left, shaped into circular seating places for people. I say deadwood hedges and logpiles for insects. I saw an area fenced off, but with gates open for the deer and signs for visitors saying not to enter, but instead to respect the privacy of the deer. I saw woodland protected from deer grazing and woodland closed off entirely for wildlife. With the ponds and some gardens, this is a real mosaic landscape.
I sat with two old trees and with them I felt the blurring, or absence, of dichotomies. Roots sinking into the past where the past becomes present as rocks break down and the long-contained minerals move into now and feed the future. Branches reach into a future they can never grasp, but always impact with their actions at an atmospheric level. Roots hold on to here, but take minerals and water from there, from a long distant there. Branches hold on to here, but, again, their impact is felt there. The tree grows up and out and grows down and along.
And I wonder what I should understand from this and the trees tells me: follow love and hold love. Step by step. Focus on here and now. Allow that to be what takes you to then and there. This is The Way.
Wonderful adventures and understandings.