We'll Always Be-Longing for the Canopies Embrace

Introductory chapter to a Forest calls you Home.

A friend once joked in truth - that I missed the 80s because I was building treehouses.

I spent my childhood roaming vast farming estates, and backyard woodlands.

Making dens. Carving sticks. Thrashing paths through the nettles to clamber on untouched boughs.

If not the woods, we were playing in fords or jumping off bridges into cold fresh currents. Shaping rivers flow with pebble dams.

Impromptu battles with mud clods, sticks, stones, or dried sheep shit.

It was at the river’s edge I had my first heartbreak. The day the river died.

We arrived to find dead eyes floating by, corpse rafts snagging on gnarled wood at rivers edge. An accidental genocide, or a line on a spreadsheet? The result of valuing life lower than infrastructure investment.A pig farm upstream had released slurry, suffocating the stream.

The river would later gasp back to life, but algal blooms would cycle through—duckweed smothering light, and bringing the stink of rot with it. It was down by the river I composted the existential horrors of my youth. Peering into the water, I couldn’t imagine a future beyond 2000. The flowing waters carried my anxieties away. Somehow I found comfort in imagining alternatives, of learning of all the alternative pathways that our lives might take. Yet I felt a burden heavily on my shoulders.

Chernobyl. The cold war and nuclear armageddon. The decimation of the Amazon. The ozone layer. Global warming. Famine. Pollution. Various media had awakened my 10 year old soul to global concerns. But the reality of the rivers death, brought it home.

In 2001, I started to relax, daring to imagine the end wasn’t nigh. Then 2 planes hit the towers. Collapse was still upon us, it just wasn’t evenly distributed*. It became clear that our governments and not just businesses were its agents. Gardeners of Global Grief.

Our systems seeded collapse across the world, now collapse is coming home.

The stage of grief I write from is a place of acceptance. 

It’s not that my heart doesn’t break anew at fresh horrors humanity brings. Yet I have been witnessing it for so long, that it rarely surprises. Yes we have to grieve, to take time to cry and weep. But these tears can be water for the forests of the future. The turmoil of the present is the turning of the soil from which new cultures may bloom.

We can pick up the threads of past, present, parallel possibilities and multiple futures, and consider what we can use, and what we can discard.

Humans are not fixed, but trapped in dysbiotic relationships by a dysfunctional system. We have the power to shape our contexts, as our contexts have the power to shape us. Though our power may be small - as many, as one, as the forest, we can do this. Forests grow from small seeds, and I’ve seen seeds crack concrete.

If we each seed a little every day, and take care to tend then rivers of green can flow forth to the future from each small spring.

I was once asked what I Believe in by a Catholic Irishwoman.

“That Humans are capable of living in peace and harmony with each other and with nature.” I replied

“You must be fucking kidding me, how can you believe such shite” she spat back.

I had been searching for a faith, and realised this was what it meant. A belief in the absence of evidence, or even when presented with all evidence to the contrary.

If you are someone who believes in a loving God, then I invite you to believe in a loving Humanity. For are we not made in God’s image?

For those who don’t believe in a loving God**. Then consider this. The only constant in the Universe is Change. Even if this Change does not love and is not even partially conscious (eg. through us). Then Humans like everything in the Universe are capable of Change. So we are capable of changing our relationship to each other and all other planetary beings.

It is thus not a question of whether change is possible, as what is possible grows by the day. It is a question of what form of change we desire, or better still BELIEVE in.

Faith may start wars, yet it can also heal hearts, and cure addiction. We can choose what we wish to believe in. I choose Love. I choose Hope. I choose Faith in our potential - to believe that Humanity can be kinder. Despite of, and in response to all the Atrocity.

For this we need mentors to guide us. We find these in the forests - from mycelial mages, and towering giants, to beaver, bear, mayfly, cicada, hunter, shaman, and forest gardener.

The trees were my first friends. My childish mind dreamed of Ewok villages, and imagining houses that teemed with life. Their canopy, my kindergarten. Leaf pits my sandbox. Now I live in the desert, and my heart longs for the forest. When I return home to the UK, I cry among the trees. Reunited with old friends. But this isn’t a book about longing. It is a book about the necessity and possibility of return. I find my childish dreams returning, imbued with a sense of urgency. I long to Belong to the Forests.

Belonging literally means to Be Long. To stretch out towards. Our soul-threads reach out to the forest. The dull background sadness of depression is countered with woodland walks, because the heart heals when whole. We each still have raw and severed threads, cut by civilisation, technology and language. Having forgotten the parts of ourselves that dwell under bramble, bask in the sun from treetop, and burrow through the soil.

We were not made to cower in concrete caves, and disassociate to survive. We were not made to produce illusions 9-5. It is a dark magic that convinces us otherwise.

It is time to take the gifts we have gained on our long journey out of the woods, and bring them home. To consider with care what can be of use, to us and to the ecosystem. To weave many worlds and communities into a blanket of belonging.

The forest calls us to become agents of Change. Sybiogenetic Organisms. Changing with the land as we change it.

To make our homes in the forests, and to make forests of our homes. I will show you that even the desert longs to grow, and is capable of change. That we can grow habitats as a by-product of our daily lives. That we can design better products, systems and relationships, and find ways of being that generate life and opportunity.

I offer here new ways to see, tools to think with, processes to guide action and potential paths to explore. To share the seeds I have gleaned from the mentors that dwell among the trees.

This book is a seed bank, there are blank pages and exercises so you can grow it in your context. To add to it new discoveries. To share your own insights and help it grow. Seeds from which we might grow food forest futures. Imagine a world where your home teems with life that nurtures you. Where foods grow from your walls, and food forests flow from the streets.

A home that digests your wastes and shits soil and food forests.

Let us feed what feeds, nurture what nurtures. Create homes that grow habitats.

Let’s grow home!

*For clarity a Universal Emergent Consciousness. Felt and experienced as a profound sense of unconditional love.