To Speak for the Trees: My Life's Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest

both love and respect the person I was becoming. By sewing acts of kindness and courage, I would reap the character I wanted to become

go out into the sunshine. Take a stand and spread out your arms, palms up. Tilt your head up, too, and let the sunshine land on your face, your hands, the rest of you. Feel the sun on the surface of your skin. With this act, you are becoming like a tree. You are acting like a tree, with your arms spread out towards the sunshine just like the leaves

proved that trees possess all the same chemicals we have in our brains. Trees have the neural ability to listen and think; they have all the component parts necessary to have a mind or consciousness.

The photosynthetic reaction is the reverse of ordinary breathing.

This, in turn, reduced the quantity of iron in the island’s coastal waters. The lack of iron stopped the division and multiplication of microscopic marine life, which meant a famine for the sea creatures that depended on that life to survive. Cutting down trees, then, is not exclusively a suicidal act. It is homicidal as well.

noticed that rare species tended to occur in places where a river ran into the sea and fresh water and salt water mingled.

Cutting down trees was a suicidal act.

trees created those conditions through the community of forests. Trees paved the way for the human family. The debt we owe them is too big to ever repay.

Basically, I would absorb every bit of information I could through my own five senses, and from there I would develop a baseline understanding of how the plant was built and how it behaved when you acted on it in certain ways. Armed with that first-hand knowledge, I would then head to the stacks to discover what knowledge others had to contribute t