Member-only story
The Ancestor Trees
*
I had been calling our land “the property” for months. Because that is what modern French real estate calls it. La propriété. It sounded neutral. It sounded practical.
Then one evening… I was watering the young chestnut trees. The sun was going down. And I heard myself say, quietly, and not entirely sure why or how: “I am watering the future ancestor trees.”
The whole field of the moment changed.
I sat down in the dirt and felt really tender for quite a while. I might even have had a tear.
Because I realized that what I called the land was actually shaping how I related to it. “The property” is something you own. “The ancestor trees” are beings you are in relationship with. Same trees. Completely different relationship.
And I really feel that the land has changed how it talks to me now…
~ Angell Deer
*
We are now living in a period of worldwide collapse and a shattering of accepted paradigms and beliefs that fragment the institutions intended to protect us…Yet whatever shatters the common patterns can also open us to psychological and mythic levels of unusual depth.
~ Michael Meade
*
