When the earth sings

I press my body to it and listen

From Forest Fae by Nadia Turner

The house I grew up in was bordered by land- a cattle farm, a hillside that sloped down to a log a cabin where my cousin lived, a grove of cedar trees, a pond with tall cattails.

In our back yard, we had a green wooden picnic table next a large tree. I spent many hours in that back yard, lying in the grass staring at the sky, climbing the wooden fence to get to the grapevine swing, and draping blankets across the picnic table to make a fort, which would have been better designed for the summer heat had a used a sheet instead.

I sat, as a child, at the foot of that tree. I leaned against it, I pressed my hands on its bark. I talked to it and it talked to me. We didn’t use words, but feelings.

Once, at my friend’s house, I discovered two books in her collection, Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet’s Gnomes and Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s Faeries. I was enthralled. I consumed the pages. I dove into them. I wanted to live in those books. When I looked at the illustrations, my whole heart lit up. This, I understood, was fiction. This, I also understood, was a nod toward a reality. There was a world, and I felt this world. I knew it existed.

After seeing the books, I began to fill acorn caps with water and gather items from the yard to leave at the base of the tree, offerings. I ducked down, made myself as small as possible, as close to the ground as I could get and whispered hello, hello, hello.

I love you.

I was around eleven when I was walking on my grandparent’s farm and saw a face in the sky. I was topping the ridge that looked down over a section of land known as the cow graveyard, when I looked up and saw it. When I say that I saw a face in the sky, I do not mean that it was a hallucination. I also don’t mean that it was a shape in the clouds. It was a third thing that I don’t know how to explain.

When I saw it, I felt it. I knew it was protective. I knew it watched over the land. I was moved by the sighting. I didn’t tell anyone about it.

Decades later, I found myself at a gathering at an eco retreat center in Wales, with people I deeply loved but had only, on this weekend, met in person. I had taken the train from Oxford, where I was staying with my mother, to Bangor. A friend collected me from the train station and we drove on a winding road at the foot of Snowdon Mountain until we reached the magic of Cae Mabon.

Our first day there, I went walking in the trees. I could feel their energy, their personalities. I was aware, for instance of a grove of tall birch that did not want me to approach.

I was captivated, overwhelmed by the intense and layered green beauty around me, the energetic vibration of the place. I walked slowly, studying bark and tiny leaves. I walked with lush waves of love and gratitude and sorrow pulsing through my body and I began to hear it.

It sounded like small soprano voices braided together. It was audible harmonic singing emanating from the trees. I was stunned. I walked and listened. It was unmistakable. There was no one else nearby, no electricity. I heard fairy voices singing - elementals. Nature spirit. I heard it with my physical ears, the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.

That night, after fireside stories in the roundhouse, I was walking alone up the hill in the dark toward my dwelling. I carried a small lantern, but it was no match to the deep dark un-electrified night. I felt someone approaching behind me. I turned around, but no one was there, so I continued, slightly unnerved. Suddenly someone, or something blew air onto the back of my neck. Puff. I felt - physically. I whipped around, but there was no one there.

No, I said, firmly, and I could almost hear laughter.

I knew it was an elemental entity, not dangerous or malevolent, but also not benevolent. A third, uncategorizable thing. I was in the domain of nature.

---

At times I hesitate to use the word fairy as it tends to conjure images of characters like Tinkerbell. I have nothing against Tinkerbell; I’m quite fond of her, but she is not representative of what I’m trying to speak about. She is, in fact, a red herring. I am trying to speak about something wild and true that exists outside the human-made constraints of systems of belief.

I have been writing here about the ebb and flow of my spiritual belief, the things I have explored, experienced, believed, and rejected during my life so far. Throughout my studies and devotions, it is the presence of nature spirit that has remained constant for me, not something about which I have to have faith, something instead that I know in my bones to be true.

Even though as a young adult, I sought the urban landscape - the pulse and risk and creative fire of the city - even though I still long for it from to time - brownstones and neon - I was raised by nature.

From early in my life, I was held by fireflies and smooth rocks that skipped across the water, tree bark and wasps nests. I walked across natural bridges of stone and talked to trees.

When I need to heal, I go to the forest or the mountains. I go to my backyard and watch bees curled in the blooms. When I am out at night and the bats swoop overhead or a moth mistakes me for a light, I remember who I am. I remember how grateful I am to be alive.