shout out to my treeps!! (get it? trees + peeps)

I can communicate empathically with plants! I suspect that my great-grandmother did too. On my mom’s side I come from a family with a bit of a supernatural bent – people who have premonitions and see ghosts. I don’t know if being able to communicate with trees is really related to that, but it might be.

When I was a lonely boarding school kid trees saved my life in small but important ways. I remember a copper beech tree just outside the dorm I lived in for three years who became almost a parental figure. We developed a relationship over the first year I was at the school, and it continued to support me over time. This wonderful tree was old, large and awesome. It was probably the most stable figure in my life, and had the clearest voice out of all the plants I’ve ever interacted with. It would remind me that I wasn’t alone, and it would give me little mental nudges when it thought my worries were too transitory to be important.

You can imagine that as a nerdy, lesbian tree-psychic I wasn’t the most popular kid ever but with the trees in their New England glory all around me I really didn’t care. I witnessed a dramatic world of life and rebirth, changing seasons and unchanging years that seemed beyond many of the things that school made me worry about. I had some human friends who were awesome, some of whom even accepted this whole tree-thing I had going on. The copper beech, a gingko down the street, a pine tree by the lake and three maples by the path to the schoolhouse all supported me too, and I needed it.

These days my life has so many human connections that I barely even remember that I can have plant ones, too. On Saturday, without thinking, I greeted a tree on campus in the way that I used to. It had been so long that I forgot how to close that part of my mind back up. It seemed as though tree consciousness were everywhere. I remembered what it used to be like on fall evenings in New Hampshire, when every deciduous tree and bush extravagantly mourned its leaves and I thought I was going crazy, surrounded by voices that weren’t voices. I remembered, too, the wonderful feeling it gave me of never having to be alone.