I woke up thinking about Jean Shinoda’s Bolen’s “Gather the Women” circles, with the phenomenon of the millionth circle (a metaphor for critical mass) tipping the world into higher consciousness, like the hundredth monkey tipping the monkeys into a species-wide knowing. If only enough of us circle…
I thought of the sacred circle of stumps outside my house and went to take a picture of it.
Healing Circle
As I did, I realized how sad and appropriate the circle of stumps was in relation to Jean. Her latest book is Like a Tree: How Trees, Women, and Tree People Can Save the Planet. The book moved me to tears, especially her story of the city-mandated felling of a tree in front of her house. When I went to take the picture, I was thinking of a circle of women sitting on the stumps, as we’ve done. But as I looked, I could think only of the trees the stumps once were. I didn’t fell the trees, but it didn’t matter. Some human did. And here were the remains—a tree graveyard.
I thought of how the cats and sometimes the wild turkeys come to sit on these stumps. I often see one or the other there. When I sit on one of the stumps at night and look out at the dark and the stars, a cat often jumps up on one of the other stumps and looks out too. I wonder if the cats and the turkeys are engaged in healing work on the bones of the trees, sending healing to all trees. That’s what I’m going to be doing from now on whenever I perch there.
A circle itself is healing. I set the healing in motion when I arranged the scattered stumps into that shape. The healing has begun…
Flowers for the fallen, flowers for healing
