This Kinship episode of the Missing Witches Podcast was written and produced by Risa Dickens. The song Beech was composed and produced by Cosmo Sheldrake with lyrics from a poem by Robert Macfarlane, and was included here with kind permission.
This is a meditation about Beech trees, Queen of Trees, vow keeper. About trees that keep their dead leaves come winter, about keeping close our ghosts, and raising our voices in ICE times. About species that belie the lie of simple gender binaries. About the great healing love of grandmother trees, and the way squirrels and cardinals tend to their forest flocks. A meditation from the days after chemotherapy and before radiation, burning with the furious fuck it all fire of being alive.
With special thanks to Dr. Siddharth Ramakrishnan, Kate Belew, Patty Kramer, Chanda Prescott-Weinstein, Sun Jesper Hansen, Jarod K. Anderson, and my grandmother who - since the time of writing - is now thankfully out of the hospital and back home sitting in state over the scrabble board.
This story begins in a dark place, but I promise it doesn’t stay there.
There is a place on the wheel of the year that always feels more like death to me than autumn. The decay of autumn hums with rot life, fungal life, the hot fuzz of compost. But after the big celebrations around the solstice, we take the lights and paper decorations down and reality sets in. The reality of war mongers, greedy profiteers, stolen elections, stolen children, stolen land, and, up here, a world sunk deeply under snow. Not just snow, ice. Hard slippery and dangerous. Ice nights where people go missing steps from their door. Ice that captures and disappears without warning, without charges.
Did you know that not all trees lose their leaves in winter? I don’t mean evergreens, I mean the decidedly deciduous, those glamour trees, green and frothy with new leaves in the spring, there is a class of these kinds of trees who do not do as the others do and shed with ease. In the woods I live by, in the death part of winter, I come across these, startling for the sound they make. A dry shuffle commenting on the wind, I remember their name because of the sound they make and always call them Speech Beech because they don’t go quiet into that good night. They hold onto their memories, their past lives, their dead and these dry leaves keep them from becoming voiceless.
Hello listener. Hello speech beech kin. Hello to all who are haunted. Welcome to the circle we make, here, in the dark between our ears.
A spell whispered into the roots of a Beech tree is said to come true.
A curse spoken underneath Beech boughs will be effective, if the tree approves.
A vow written on a beech leaf and buried can draw forth the support of the earth gods.
I have what one might call a consent-based relationship with ghosts, gods, spirits. I need them to keep their distance. I have the kind of imagination that can see things too vividly, conjure ideas, feelings, worlds between my ears and before my inner eyes with the slightest suggestion and then feel the whole feeling of the imagined thing till I am crying unconsolably, my mind can spill over, take me over. I’m the kind to be too easily possessed.
There are different kinds of imagination. My friend Isabelle can’t see things when she closes her eyes, if you ask her to picture an apple she doesn’t know what you mean but her jaw might move with the act of biting through, she might involuntarily wipe sweet juice from her face, she feels but doesn’t see. Maybe you’re like Isabelle, or maybe you hear things clearly inside your mind, different voices, different music, maybe you see sketches of black and white, maybe a whole forest of apple trees bloom into being and take your breath away.
Maybe it was being raised by mental health professionals, but I’ve always sensed that if I’m not strict about boundaries I could too easily lose my mind to the idea of ghosts. I’m afraid if I let them or the imagination of them in, I’ll never sleep again, I’ll lose my solitude, my inner self, my mental health. So I tend to my ancestor altar, laying flowers and baked goods and candy and booze and tea before photos of my beloved dead, look them in the eye and feel them around me, but I keep a circle of distance steady in my mind and invite them to come only so close. Only when I’m writing. I don’t accept seeing or hearing them elsewhere. This is the place we can fuse or collaborate: here with each spurt of thought turned to gentle tapping, manifesting in strings of light, dark marks stored in light, in what might one day be printed on the bodies of trees, this is where I hear the rattling of the dry leaves kept lovingly close long after the green quickness in them is gone. This is where I send my prayers. Here, and into the roots of trees.
In beech trees, this behaviour of ghostkeeping is called Marcescence. Biologists theorize that this behavior evolved in certain tree families maybe as a means of protection, the leaves rattle and startle in the quiet winter woods and scare off nervous deer who, starving, would pull off the bark of trees when no other, sweeter food is available and in doing so damage the tree’s thin defenses against insects and rot which can mean death come spring.
Beech kin keep our dead close for protection, they make us bigger and louder than we are on our own. When we are skin and bones and out in the cold, we are not alone. In the wind, we hold our arms up and our ancestors use the wind to speak, to cackle, to roar, to keep our own death at bay while we stay and complete our turning of the wheel.
Canadian Jasmine Moody held by ICE for two weeks detained in a freezing concrete cell because her visa was incomplete wrote down the stories of the other women she met there, carried their letters to the media,to their families, none of the people she met had a criminal record, people just trying to make a life, disappeared and tormented without due process by guards who didn’t themselves know why, didn’t know what was going on, knew what they saw was wrong:
I met a woman who had been on a road trip with her husband” wrote Moody “She said they had 10-year work visas. While driving near the San Diego border, they mistakenly got into a lane leading to Mexico. They stopped and told the agent they didn’t have their passports on them, expecting to be redirected. Instead, they were detained. They are both pastors.
I met a family of three who had been living in the US for 11 years with work authorizations. They paid taxes and were waiting for their green cards. Every year, the mother had to undergo a background check, but this time, she was told to bring her whole family. When they arrived, they were taken into custody and told their status would now be processed from within the detention center.
…
There was a girl from India who had overstayed her student visa for three days before heading back home. She then came back to the US on a new, valid visa to finish her master’s degree and was handed over to Ice due to the three days she had overstayed on her previous visa.
There were women who had been picked up off the street, from outside their workplaces, from their homes. All of these women told me that they had been detained for time spans ranging from a few weeks to 10 months. One woman’s daughter was outside the detention center protesting for her release.
Trust me the trees scream their fury at this and every injustice, they lend their voices and their strength to the incantation Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Justice, they whisper, justice.
Where others close off the veins of the sap of life, we don’t let go so easily. Witches, tree kin, beech people, we make a link of sweetness instead. We hold onto each other, even the missing, even our ghosts, even the disappeared, and we get loud.
I know it’s terrifying. I read these things and feel the cold concrete against my skin, the trauma, the inhumanity, the walls closing in. I know you do too. There are so many layers of cruelty happening all at once, the goal is our numbness, fear, our submission.
But listen.
Listen to the leaves, the wind, the waves, the great pulse of life humming through the air, the ground, and the gathering crowds. We are everywhere. Indigenous leaders taught us to look for the medicine that shows up; Mr Rogers taught us to look for the helpers, the spiders that live with the beech teach us to infiltrate and hide in plain sight, they protect their eggs with two different colours of silk for camouflage, trees send you this breath, and the next, with the message: we are everywhere. There are more of us who still remember empathy and love and care than there are of them.
Imagine: a layer of sap shining amber around you like a circle of protection, your past selves, your beloved dead, a rainbow of your distant friends, stay close and whisper and roar: only kin with your highest good in mind are permitted to come close to you. Walk the circle of your body, encase it in shining sweet hard sap with your mind, trace your body gently with your hands and know you extend beyond what you can feel and everywhere you hum with past and present and future potential layered like so many green seasons, walk the circle of your space, shake something that sounds like dry leaves, brush your hands together, shake your hair, sing, rattle, hum, a song to all your protectors, all your guides, all your most loving grandparents, all the ten thousand generations of survivors in your family lines, tall trunks tending small seedlings, and the earth, and her atmosphere above and below, the living presence who sparkles through you with that flicker of caught lightning that is signals cascading through neurons called action potentials, what neuroscientist Siddharth Ramakrishnan calls the fundamental energy of life. The heart beat of human minds and trees. Feel into your kin and let them strengthen you.
This is the Season of just a little more light:
Spring is pages we flip past on a calendar
The earth is under 6 feet of snow pack, we walk on the lake and my kid says we are walking on clouds and she is right.
The wind is material, is ice.
Change is in the degree of light, making mornings fill up with a hope longing, the idea of melting if not the melt itself.
Enchantment is an unforgetting.
After the season of death is the season of soon now, but not yet.
The underground is alive, you have to believe and breathe and wait.
(This poem was created within the Nature Writing group of the Missing witches coven, following a prompt from Kate Belew)
The beech trees are alive with memory, and alive with water too, their gatherings of not-fallen leaves hold more snow than bare branches might, and when a little warmth does break through they hold their cups of water aloft and let it trickle down their arms to melt the ice that imprisons their feet, and so they begin to run in wake up songs.
And when spring does come, and new a bud gently, adamantly makes a place for itself and the dry leaves finally do fall, they offer nutrients to hungry thawing soil and create a protective layer around the base of the tree so water won’t evaporate as quickly and fungi can grow and carry the messages of the fallen leaves into the communication pathways at the roots of the tree.
The tree is not a metaphor. The tree predates us - and the concept of metaphor - by millions of years. The beech tree is the genus Fagus, the etymological origin of the word fag or faggot, a bundle of beech branches wandered through time and became hate speech but it rests my heart a little to know that in their root words queer kids and singing, ancient beech trees are kin. The genus Fagus has an exceptionally complete fossil record, they are record keepers, dating back to the late early Eocene, a period roughly 52 to 47.8 million years ago, a time when the world was free of ice and covered in forests, Eocene means new dawn and earns its name because of all the new fauna that emerged at this time. This period ends with mass extinction events as the planet slips into ice. Beeches remember all of this.
There is a common myth of binary sexuality being the norm in nature, but this is like, deeply, wildly untrue, the diversity of sex identity in plants and animals is mind-blowingly diverse. Beeches with their 50 million year old wisdom belie the lie of simple binary gender. They are both female and male in the same body. And maybe that’s why Beech are both the Queen of Trees, and a Tree God Guardian named Fagus, revered at a hilltop sanctuary in the High Pyrenees.
“Beeches are monoecious, bearing both male and female flowers on the same plant.”
How can you not love this, science, history, tree mythology?
Maybe it is the weird words that trigger anti-science anger in minds that know in a secret place inside that they are missing something. Angry that they don’t understand, that they weren't taught, that they struggle to have the time, focus, support to get to know. The gap widens as fields radically specialize and opens sharp caverns of danger between people, especially in places with politicized education systems. What the sciences have discovered, each in their rapidly advancing domains, digging deep into earth, into language, into cells, standing on shoulders of giants with long digital arms and robot legs racing them forward, gets harder for the uninitiated to wrap our minds around, and millions of people get left behind in lead-painted, underfunded classrooms angry at the injustice of not getting to know too, to go too, and that anger has to go somewhere.
The anger of the knowledge-poor, systemically disenfranchised from science and culture and collective action requires our radical empathy.
But.
The people put in physical danger by that anger deserve by rights the blazing heart of our protection. Each person has a right to safety and when violence is threatened or enacted, the victims have got to be kept at the very center and heart of protection and of our revolutionary action, and that’s why we are loud about trans rights, about indigenous women, about poverty, the rights of immigrants and refugees and people with disabilities and about the importance of teaching the history of slavery: The evidence is clear: “Violence disproportionately affects vulnerable populations such as women, children, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and intersex individuals, and those living in poverty...” It’s not because we are woke, it’s because their lives are at stake. And witches know about stakes.
And beeches know about becoming awake.
Druids write: “In The Bach Flower Remedies” (spells for healing of a non-scientific kind - aside mine) “Beech is used against mental rigidity, fault finding, intolerance, arrogance and lack of sympathy. Meditation with the Beech helps us relax and let go of fixed ideas, which hinders us and our development. The tree will helps get in touch with our ancestors, their knowledge passed down through time and the deep wisdom within, which can help us see ways forward for the future.”
Beeches with their 50 million-year-old wisdom belie the lie of simple binaries, even in the black white of winter their yellow leaves sing of something more. They can hold opposites and contradiction, male and female, life and death in their arms all winter long.
“Beeches small flowers are unisexual, the female flowers borne in pairs, the male flowers wind-pollinating catkins.”
Beech trees can polinate themselves, with the help of the wind, maybe this is part of why they keep their leaves, to sing with their wind love until its time for spring. Beech males and females live together in one tree - They don’t just live together, they are physically one. Just as you and I are physically one on this being that is Earth, even though I know it’s hard to feel that, tiny as we are, and isolated in our busy working waking minds with our default mode networks in high alert all the time. I can only see what I can see from here, I can only imagine so far with the thought structures, symbols, dreams and ideas I have accessed so far, but out there, beyond the reach of all my roots and branches, everything I’ve read and experienced, the web is vast and beings are loving in myriad ways in order to keep life unfolding, and my little lifeforce is a part of that and if anything is divine it's that. The limitless, cascading mesh of ongoing.
To be clear, I’m not a witch who is convinced about the sacred. Call me animist agnostic most days: there may be a god, it might be the lake, the trees, the song the wind makes. If you want to call anything divine, that’s fine, but I don’t mind if, instead, as theoretical cosmologist Chanda Prescott-Weinstein told the co-host of the Medicine for Resistance podcast: Patty, that’s just physics.
Seek the truth. Believe in physics or tree gods, whatever you need to in order to survive the turning of the wheel, so long as you as kind, and harm none. And when you feel battered by the turning of the wheel, take our coven-mate Granny’s Witch’s advice and come closer to the center.
Come away from the wild swinging spokes, the flailing branches, come home to the hub of all your self and sensing, the heartwood, strong as steel in the core of each tree holding still while the universe spins around it. Come back to center where the spin’s trajectory is smallest. Come back, calls the beech, and the deadleaves carry her song.
Last night I had a dream about my friend Sun (Hesper Jansen). Today I received a card from them in which they wrote:
“Heartwood to sapwood
This long road I travel,
Time layered in scars,
Intrusions barked over,
All part of my armor.
I won’t make it easy
To cut me down,
Trace all my seasons,
Number my battles,
My years of plenty
Those years,
With so much love around me
I see clearly
Ahead of me.
Last fall, we walked along the wide sunny path through the forest on the far side of the little lake where we live, out here north of Montreal on unceded Anishinaabe territory. It was warm and the leaves had just begun to turn, some crackled beneath our feet, our kiddo ran ahead and Marc and I walked slowly, I was still healing from my bilateral mastectomy and turning the coming chemo days over in my mind all the time, feeling the fear of them, maybe trees feel winter coming and the ice that will still their veins and all the riotous life, green and glamorous, along their limbs that will die as they become slow inside. Chemo kills all your fast-moving cells. You slow, and it is a kind of winter.
Anyway, we were walking along this autumn path when something fell from a high height above us and clunk-crashed right at our feet. Marc bent to pick it up and it was a large heavy seed pod covered in prickly spines, a beech nut. As we held it, passed it back and forth between us, another hit the ground paces away, and then another, were we under attack? We looked up and saw a small red squirrel 60feet above us, diligently moving from branch to branch, snipping stems, sending seed pods pounding to the forest floor below. We moved a little ways away, noticing now the dozens, hundreds of spiny beech nut pods along the path, and watched the squirrel work at harvesting the bounty of this mast year. It seemed manic, wasteful, to send so many nuts to the ground, more than they could find and gather and hoard for the winter, squirrels leave caches everywhere and abandon them often. In the days after, the paths stayed thick with abandoned seeds and we thought: why don’t they maximize their profits, why don’t they strategize better and deputize some underlings to work the path and arm them with tiny ak47s to defend the piles? Also, alternately, why don’t they just take what they need and live in better sacred harmony? Why don’t they listen to me, I have so many opinions? My ego painted itself all over the forest and then I felt ashamed.
Jarod K Anderson writes,
“I will never comprehend a tree as a footpath like a squirrel can. I can’t understand the sky the way a vulture riding a thermal does. I can’t know what a pond is the way a musk turtle knows. But I will sense the presence of these hidden perspectives and feel grateful that my human ways of knowing the world do not hold a monopoly on reality. There’s comfort in my certainty that the scope of natural perception is not tethered to my own limitations. Perhaps it’s worth imagining ourselves from the perspective of Squirrels.
How brave we are to walk boldly across the ground in full view of hawks and foxes. How impossibly giant. How remarkably long-lived. How magnificent it must feel to be too heavy to be carried off by grasping talons and beating wings.
We can all imagine the biting words of make-believe critics. So, we can also imagine the accolades of admiring squirrels. We are, after all, storytellers. Make sure that some of the stories you tell yourself are kind.”
A little further on in his heart-breaking, mending memoir, Something in the Forest Loves You, Jarod continues:
“As with most invisible wonders, the problem is that we don’t take the time to notice, to interrogate our typical viewpoints about squirrels. If we don’t willfully “opt out,” we default to the standard stories of our culture.
Yes, they will empty your birdfeeder. They are also the most effective and essential forest regenerators in North America, compulsively burying nuts, many of which they never retrieve. Some assume this is an accident, but I doubt “accident” is the correct word for an ancient process that expands forests and enriches species beyond count. It’s amazing what humans will dismiss as happenstance in the absence of an anthropocentric story of clear intention. Some gray squirrels have been observed pretending to bury a nut if they think they are being observed, a feint to fool would-be robbers. They are one of a very few mammals that can climb down a tree headfirst. They can live two decades, leap ten times their body length, transform the landscape and, ultimately, the climate. Yet, few people will pause to give one a second look. The relationship between squirrels and trees is harmonious in a way that is lovely to consider. Instinctual gardeners living in their generational gardens. In the dynamic of squirrels and trees, it’s hard to say which is the shepherd and which is the flock. There’s a wonderful lesson in that, disparate creatures thoughtlessly caring for one another,
as natural as breathing.”
Beech trees are being herded north by squirrels and mice, cardinals and blue jays, at rates of at least 200 to 300 m per year.
The bright birds and clever soft mammals are moving in a dance with tree flocks, both shepherding, both tending, both homesteading and home to each other, and to me too.
It eases my mind in ICE times to remember that you are tended by flocks of trees, their knowledge works its way into everything you touch. They offer you every breath and they take as a gift your every exhalation. Beech trees are in the beams of your house, in your bookshelves and in the history of every book you’ve ever read - Beeches are right at the heart of human knowledge, they carried our first stories: in many languages the word for beech and book is the same.
The bark of the beech tree was used by Indo-European people for writing, especially in a religious context, before the development of paper. Ancient texts describe beech tablets inscribed with runes. (source) The Old English bōc has the primary sense of "beech" but also a secondary sense of "book", and it is from bōc that the modern word derives. In modern German and Dutch the word for "book" and "beech tree" are almost identical. There is a similar relationship in Russian and Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovene. In Swedish, the words are the same. (source)
Beeches speak, and carry speech, and know about how to make ideas material. In their bodies they carry the stories of the dead and the quickness of the living. Storykeepers, truth tellers, we are beech kin. Imagine yourself from the perspective of squirrels, of trees, imagine how they love your bravery.
We watched the squirrel tend the beech flock in the fall, in the before-chemo time, and now it's frozen spring and we are in the after-chemo. The pain has almost entirely left my legs and fingers. I feel moments of pure euphoria at being alive no matter what, no matter how many body parts I must sacrifice on the altar of my survival, I’m like the giving tree, take these breasts, ovaries, womb, fuck it I am alive. Beech trees can regrow from stumps. No matter how terrifying the greedy maw of oligarchs, the would-be murderers of human empathy, the anti-science anti-care machines of dictators, fuck you all I am alive, right now I rage with the glory of a heart still pumping and the trees scream and whisper the same: we are still here, we are legion, we are allied with all that wants to live and all that ever has been, hear us on the wind.
I am speaking to you from the days before real spring, and before radiation begins, when the hot waves, the heat in your skin chases away the last microscopic cancer cells that have gone deep underground, buried in the flesh, hidden in the lymphatic system. Certain tailored beams of light will seek them out, but I'm not ready for it yet. I want to run into the new world, the new body, but deep inside, my cells are still working on microscopic recovery, repair, prepare.
I stand underneath the beach trees. Listen to the messages from last season's leaves. Think about the people I lost this winter.
My wise friend Robin, my sweet uncle Ron. Fierce grief goddess Terra.
In the leaves, I see a hope for keeping these ghosts close, and I see their spiky little buds as well. Their new leaves come in like tiny blades, tightly curled. Sharp but downy soft as well. And their catkins like tiny cudgels packed tight with all their potential future pollen, kings and queens on the same tree-being. A message of millions of years. A way forward together.
And I hear in their rustling, pages turning, fabric moving softly against skin like a child, dancing before a mirror, reveling in the joy of a gown, a cloak. In our family all our garments are thrifted, my grandmother is a thrift witch and she taught us the ways of returning to the hoards regularly, calling what you need to you, but even when clothes are new they hold the ghosts of many hands, many patterns, many stitches and weavings. Beech tree teach me to listen to the stories in my clothes, make every object that comes close to our skin animate so that it speaks of how we might contribute to the weaving of care for the stitchmakers of the world.
My grandmother is in the hospital.
The sack of liquid around her heart is infected, pushing in on her painfully, but they say the medication is working, they’ll just increase the dose one more time, and at 92 the careful caretakers say, one more day don’t worry, she'll be home soon, where she belongs, under a blanket crocheted my her mother or quilted by mine, sitting in state over puzzles, queen of the scrabble board, playing dolls with my daughter, dressing them in all the tiny handmade clothes she made last christmas.
She is my mother tree. I spent a long time struggling to feel in my bones that I was loved. Love never seemed to quite make it past my blades and cudgels, all my tightly curled defenses, I knew it on paper and I pretended, but not with her. She didn’t have to slip past my defenses, around her they just were gone. She is love like a protective layer around my heart, like messages under the ground moving through my whole system. If I know how to love now, and I do, and I am determined to beam it outward at the whole world adamant with my optimism bright like a flock of red birds, its because of her and seeds she planted.
My grandmother loves cardinals. We went and had a sleepover with her at her tiny house after chemo, before she got sick, and counted 37 cardinals in her 10ft by 10 ft livingroom. When I was in labour a cardinal landed on the beech tree I rocked and moaned beneath, and after my daughter was born cardinals sat outside my window while I healed. I spoke to her from the hospital and she said she spent the days watching the world go by from her window and just this morning she swore she’d seen a cardinal flashing past.
I say this to say that even when evil casts an illusion of our isolation, we are surrounded by good grandparents. Beeches can live 400 years. If you don’t know your grandmother or if she was not kind, you can borrow mine. She is tiny and humble and wears slippers that say Glam. She laughs easily and likes a little afternoon ginger and whiskey. She is cupping her soft pale delicate hand gently to your face and saying I love you, love you, my darling. She is medicine for the softest part of you, of me, together we will keep alight a legacy of kindness and empathy, we will be warriors for birdsong and tender saplings.
“Hi, this is great Grandma calling. I'm calling to tell you how wonderful my children are. I love all you people. I love all my family. Be brave. And accept things as they are. I love you all very, very dearly. Right to the end. I love you. You're so sweet, so caring, so loving. You brought me a lot of happiness in my day.
Have a long life, guys love you.”
I hope you'll take these messages and bits of stories like leaves falling close, covering your roots, swirling in protection with your own ghosts. Dreaming a world dream of bounty and love and life and all its mad myriad unfolding, a dream still held like tight potential in your heart and every heartbeat and every heartwood. The possibility of a new dawn, Eocene, a kind of heaven on earth, not a place of exclusion or manic piles of cryptocurrency, but a living tapestry of life in mutual tending, life in chirping joyful balance, in brilliant multicoulored harmony.
That’s the spell still written all along your skin and trunk, like the blue-green lichen circles that walk along the faces of the beech, that’s the song of every ancestor who kept the tiny seed of life alive, of every drop of water and beam of light working in astonishing harmony. We could live well together. We could prosper kindly.
It's spring and we are beech tree kin, tender and potent, in the cross hairs of then and what’s to come.
Whisper it into the roots, write it on the leaves.
May we keep faith with the living world. May we live in honour of all our most loving ancestors while we’re alive, and earn our place among the sunlight and the tide.
This or better.
Blessed Fucking Be.
