Jason Heppenstall

Aside from the usual trade of oxygen for carbon dioxide, trees have saved my life on more than one occasion. When I was sixteen years old and ready to kill myself, the oak trees around my parents’ house told me not to do it because I had important work to do in the future. At that time, I had no idea how to properly talk to trees and any time I did, I was winging it. I also had no inclination to believe the experiences were real, which was a product of my casually Christian upbringing. At least I did not think of talking to trees as demonic — my friends at the time with overbearing Christian parents would have probably had to deal with that sort of attitude.

My parents bought a cottage in Michigan in the 1980s. The cottage was on the shore of a small lake. Though the property was the size of a small, ranch house with a detached garage, we still called it the cottage. The cottage was considerably larger than the house I live in now, where I wrote Sacred Homemaking.

I had a love/hate relationship with the cottage. Though it was a restful, tranquil place, it isolated me from the few friends I had at that age. At the exact time my few female friends were going on group dates and getting boyfriends, I was stuck in a remote-yet-luxurious cabin in the north woods. They kissed under the bleachers while I read Jane Eyre.

The cottage and lake were adjacent to a managed forest of white pines. The pines were planted in rows so they could be easily harvested. The rows were organized in grids separated by fire breaks. I spent a great deal of my lonesome adolescence walking those fire breaks. In the middle of the forest, behind the ring of cottages and houses around the lake, there was a patch of meadow that had been left gloriously alone for at least a hundred years. In it were the remnants of an apple orchard and a few huge maple trees, giants from an earlier era with trunks that dwarfed the largest oaks of the posh neighborhood in which I grew up. The best memories I have of the cottage involve time spent under the great maple tree. There was a huge bed of creeping periwinkle underneath it which was likely planted sometime between the World Wars. I often talked to the maple. I named it the Wishing Tree. At the time, I thought of myself as somewhat crazy for talking to the Wishing Tree, not understanding that talking trees would one day become my normal.

My teenage torment over the plight of trees was a large part of the reason I became vegetarian in my teens. Sting and Peter Gabriel did a world tour for Amnesty International, and though I neither attended the concerts nor knew of the tour while it happened, I became obsessed with a documentary made about the concert series and the liberal causes it championed. One of these was the Save the Rainforest campaign, and since the British rock stars were plonking themselves down in South America to sing and strum, I became upset that the Amazon rainforest was being devastated for cattle farming. My bleeding teenage heart broke for the trees of the Amazon being mowed down for McDonalds hamburgers. I stopped eating meat despite neither Sting nor anyone else on the Amnesty tour being vegetarian (nowadays Sting eats meat and Peter Gabriel eats fish, back then I have no idea what they ate) I took up vegetarianism and tepidly convinced myself I was doing my part for the trees.

College arrived and I had no more time to go to the cottage or to hang out with trees. I spent the majority of the time either commuting on the bus and train or indoors. Predictably, college was a miserable time in my life, marred by insomnia and various forms of blind groping. I would mostly forget about trees until my forties, when I took up the practices of revival Druidry around the year 2015.

Must love trees

Druids come in all sizes and shapes. There are Christian Druids, atheist Druids, and Hawaiian Druids. There are the original Druids whom we know very little about because they refused to write anything down. Perhaps the only thing all Druids have in common is we all must love trees.

My college experience was crap because I did not spend enough time wandering outside looking for trees to hug. I was too preoccupied with the busywork of life, not realizing most of my sorrows could be ameliorated by touching a tree. The three daily practices of Revival Druidry, discursive meditation, the Sphere of Protection banishing ritual, and divination had the weird effect of drawing me back into the forest preserve. As a post-college atheist, the few walks I took in the forest preserve felt odd and a little bit frightening, like a botched attempt to recapture the enchantment of the Wishing Tree in Michigan. I felt good after I walked in the forest preserve, but it took me a great deal of planning and motivation to get there. It felt like exercise — an activity that I knew I should do because it was “good for you” yet I did not feel I truly needed. It was easy enough to put it off or not do it at all. When I walked in a forest preserve, I was encapsulated in my own bubble world of self-concern, worry, petty irritation, and anxiety. In short, I was more like the majority of humans who sped on bikes or jogged by me as fast as they could go with helmets, ear buds, and expensive arrays of specialty gear. An alien who landed in any of the preserves would have thought the forest preserve district instituted a yuppie dress code.

(Though a stained T shirt and jeans would be more than adequate on the forest preserve path, the affluent and wannabe affluent wish to be both protected and seen. For them, nature is an outdoor gym where the goal is to take selfies to prove they got their steps in. This is how they attempt to win the perceived game of life, by being well-equipped, driven, determined, and fabulous. They exert Herculean, grueling effort in order to stay fit, never slowing down or turning off the techno beats long enough to hear the sound of sandhill cranes or to see the rare hummingbird moth land on an open mallow bloom. They might as well ride a stationary bike in an air conditioned basement somewhere, with a virtual reality headset providing an AI simulation of the world outside. This would certainly be safer than spinning down actual Meatworld paths where trees fall and create surprise death traps for speeding bikes, but I digress…)

Discursive meditation led to deeper thoughts about my own experiences with trees and helped me to rediscover my childhood memories of the great oaks around my parents’ house. The deciduous oak groves of the upper Midwest are the providers of the web of life in any lands where prairie does not rule. They are what mangroves are to swamps and what grasses are to grassland. Though imported white oaks came to supplant the native red oaks, the relative newcomers absorbed the spirit of the land just as the Wishing Tree embodied the Michigan lakeland.

I was the luckiest girl on earth when I was adopted at a week old to live among the trees in the white oak grove. Instead of being marooned with my mother by birth who hated me from the moment I was conceived, I was spirited away to a paradise of generosity where I could walk among pussy willows in Spring and fly in my nightly dreams through the canopy of sheltering oak giants.

For even as an atheist, the trees reached out to me. In the deepest cloak of godlessless, I had recurring dreams where my feet lifted off the ground and I flew up to the branches of the huge oak trees of my hometown. Between each gap of oak branches yawned a dimension door to a new dream world. This was not unlike Dr. Strange comics and movies where Dr. Strange and his mystical brethren conjure escape portals to other worlds. The main difference was that I did not conjure the dimension doors — the oaks did. I had the dreams for long enough that when I was truly suicidal, the oaks intervened, asking “If you go, who will talk to us from your plane? Who will see us?”

I am a slow learner and an even slower worker. It took me over ten years to write and (badly) produce an album of songs called the Dream of Flight, which centers around a leitmotif I had during one of my tree portal flying dreams. Nevertheless, the oaks got their album. I hope to rework and re-produce all the songs again someday.

Druidry reoriented my focus from trees as dream portals to the trees themselves as personalities and collectives. Trees are individuals as distinct as you and me. They have preferences, love, hatred, and intention. Most are friendly towards us humans and most of them want to talk. Some do not.

As you can probably guess, I found this out by spending plenty of time with trees. Like a former recluse who decides to start introducing himself at gatherings with low expectations, I found myself outside a great deal more after picking up Druidry. I went on walks, often forcing myself despite feeling rather stupid. If I found a tree of interest, I stopped at it and stared at it for a moment, opening myself to any impressions that came up. I went home and studied my observations. I meditated on various trees, often meditating on the same species of tree over and over again for its features, its history, it uses by mankind, and its lore. I wondered what the tree would say if it spoke human language. I began doing Druid tree rituals, which sound fancy but are nothing more than sitting with one’s back to a tree for a few minutes.

Cedric, the tree who changed my life

I was fewer than five years into my daily Druid practices when I met Cedric the Eastern cedar. At the time, I was still teaching music out of a rented commercial space in a small storefront in Naperville, a busy suburb of Chicago. I often hung out on the rickety back porch of my bit of commercial rental. The porch, which was little more than a catwalk, faced a scraggly out lot and the backs and dumpster areas of other nearby buildings. Near my building, there was an Eastern cedar that was growing so close to the building that a large chunk had been shaved off. I began talking to this tree when I went out there. I called her Mama. One cold and slightly rainy day in late winter/early spring, I spied a tiny green growth sticking out of the base of the building near a power box and a mess of incoming tubes with cables in them. As I drew closer, I could nearly hear Mama shouting at me, “SAVE MY BABY!” Against my own better judgement, I went inside where I just so happened to have a small, orange plastic garden shovel. I spent the better part of twenty minutes slowly digging around the Eastern cedar seedling, knowing that one false move could get me electrocuted. As I dug, I could see the visions of horror Mama was trying to put in my head of the seedling being uprooted and thrown in the dumpster, poisoned, or chopped. He was destined for death and the bigger he got, the worse his fate.

I mentally yelled in my head “I GOT HIM!” once I had extracted the seedling, scooping him into a cracked plastic bowl because I did not have a plant pot. I took him home that day and planted him in front of my little house in the light rain. I named him Cedric because he is an Eastern cedar. Get it? Ced-ar. Ced-ric.

After Cedric was safe in my yard, I asked Mama if she missed her baby and I assured her he was doing well. She said she knew he was doing fine because the network of trees would always connect her to him even beyond their deaths. Years later, Cedric is a big boy. He is thriving. He still converses with his mother and other trees in the tree network, which works better than any human communication system in existence.

Going native

Talking to trees and Cedric especially broadened my perspective. If I could receive primary, specific directives from individual trees, perhaps I could do the same with other objects, including objects that most people do not consider to be alive. Perhaps I could do the same thing with spaces. Cedric and his mother showed me that it wasn’t the world that had always been dull, it was me who had been dull all along. The trees, places, and even my toaster were sentient this whole time. All of the things and beings are infused with what Native Americans called the manitou or Great Spirit. When I opened my eyes to the concept of non-human beings having intention and will just as I have them, I became part of the great whole instead of a squeaky cog presuming it was the entire universe. A productive member of an ecosystem is one who does not try to dominate that ecosystem, but instead assumes her tiny part in making that ecosystem a better place.




Cedric in 2020



Cedric in 2025