Acid Rain by R.D Rhodes (ebook reader txt) 📕

“I thought about that.”

“But yeah, these are the oldest trees. They don’t really die. You see this, look.” He pointed to the two large trunks on the tree. “They’re multi-stemmed. So they die, and then can grow back and continue living from the new stem. They can live up to like, five thousand years. The druids all worshipped them.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. The Celtic druids, well, all the Celts, worshipped them. Then, when the Christians came, how were they gonna convert them? They wouldn’t leave their trees! So they built all the churches and graveyards around the yews they worshipped. That’s why you always see yews in churchyards…But saying that, the Celts didn’t even believe in death. Before they became Christian, they had no concept of heaven or hell. They thought rebirth was automatic.. the Romans thought they were mental. They charged into battle without an ounce of fear. They even put off paying debts to each other until the next world.”

“That’s cool.” I said. “What else did they believe?”

“Well, we can’t know, because they never wrote anything down. Pretty much everything we know was written by the Christian monks who came to civilize them. Everything was passed down orally, like Homer. But they believed the soul resides in the head. And that everything was energy. And all around them was an invisible realm of gods, spirits, fairies and giants. And talking trees.” he joked. “But seriously though, they would have talked with the trees. If they worshipped them, what else would they be doing?”

He was still enraptured by the grove, touching the barks everywhere, inspecting each tree. I walked away and left him, looking back from a distance. He bent down and kissed one of the roots, and clasping his hands, looked like he was saying a little prayer.

Chapter 61

O ver the next few weeks we kept busy, building a wood-drying shelter with old logs we’d found, and going fishing every few days. Some of the trout and eels we caught we skinned and gutted and immediately cooked on the fire, and some we smoked for later. Harry spent a lot of his time whittling objects from bits of wood, and I’d often come back from meditating in the forest to find him carving an animal statue, or a shelf, or something else.

I could feel my inner voice, a guide within my head and gut, getting stronger every day. And I followed it wherever it led me- through the trees, along the river, and up and down the hills and mountains. I went into long reveries, and often completely lost track of time, four or five hours passing when I thought it had only been one. Those hours were spent often completely without thoughts, just me being in the present moment, with my breath, the sounds of the rustling branches and the wind and the birds, and water if a stream was near or if it was raining. And the feeling of the grass I sat on and the leaves that brushed against me, and the cold and the wet on my skin, and my beating heart and the sensations of the body I occupied. But most of all the breath.

I realized how much it was possible to separate the mind from thoughts. That the thoughts that came into my head were not really me. That the whole personality process was not really me. I was often in a state of bliss. Sometimes Harry came with me and we meditated together, but he was finding it difficult. Said he couldn’t concentrate. But he didn’t seem to mind anyway, and it was the happiest I’d seen him. He said he wished that he had come out to a place like this sooner, and that he never even thought about suicide anymore.

It felt good to have company, but we never got in each other’s way. We seemed to have the balance going perfectly.

I was patient and calm and happy. From all of my meditations and experiences, both over those weeks and back over the many years of my life, there were three things that I was certain of. Three truths, I would call them. For one, I had absolutely no doubt that there was no such thing as death. Everything was just energy, and not only did the organic bodies of plants and animals and humans become the ground, and stay part of the ecology- but the soul lived on, as I had seen in the hospital, and in my visions and dreams. And the feather I’d been given was further proof.

I also knew, that there was something greater than us all, that we could all aspire to- God, the spirits, the other dimension, the universe, nature- whatever you called it. It could be tapped into and used to heal yourself, and to grow, and to be a better thing and a greater part of the cosmos. A divine being even.

And the third thing I was also positive about, but I knew it would take science a long time to catch up- was that the trees were intelligent. They were conscious beings. The whole planet was intelligent. A living, breathing, self-regulating thing, with many other living breathing, self-regulating, intelligent species on it, besides the humans and the animals.

I worked on myself, day in, day out. I prayed and reflected and meditated, on my childhood, my dad, my development, everything. But I couldn’t help wondering about the future. The leaves all fell off the trees, and only the yews and pines remained green, and it felt like everything was dead or asleep as winter drew around. I wondered how long I could really stay there. I was a fugitive. But there had to be a good chance I could appeal the decision. And find the courage this time, and strength, to try and fight that fucked-up system, and clear my name. I couldn’t stay here