Читать книгу Like a Tree - Jean Shinoda Bolen - Страница 17

Linda Milks became a tree activist after she received what she calls her mission in life as a communication from trees that she took to heart. She is the founder of the Nature Speaks Project. On a beautiful, sunny day in 1999, she was enjoying a drive on winding roads through the trees and hills in Marin County, north of San Francisco, when “I began to notice an organized thought form come into my awareness.” It was an unusual experience for her. When it persisted, she pulled over to the side of the road to focus on the specific, telepathic communication she was receiving. She says, “I simply knew this was coming from Trees. My experience was one of listening to something coming from outside of myself and not a thought coming from within. I had no doubt that Tree consciousness was ‘speaking.’ They wanted a bridge of understanding between trees and humans.” At the time, Linda felt the message was specifically for her, but since then, she has come to believe that it was more like an all-points bulletin, and she was one of the humans who responded. She says that at that moment, she knew that she would answer the call and that her own growth would be tied directly to this work.

This is inner knowledge, or gnosis—the certainty that people feel when they respond from deep recognition or know the significance of the choice they are making, while not knowing where it will lead and that others are likely not to understand. Yet for those with such certainty and courage to trust, the promise is that this is an authentic and meaningful choice, chosen by soul rather than ego. So the Nature Speaks Project began with Linda's idea that she would interview people who could speak with trees to record their stories.

One of the stories in the website collection (Nature Speaks Project) is Linda's own: When she was nine and lived in Lake Jackson, Texas, she took an axe to cut down a small tree. The trunk was probably about six inches in diameter, the tree ten to twelve feet tall. She approached the tree feeling powerful and excited. Then she swung the ax and made a cut into the tree. Something felt wrong; she felt she was hurting someone and shouldn't be doing this. Her reaction didn't feel rational, so she made a second cut, and at that point, she received a telepathic communication, the tone of which was “that of a wise, patient, and compassionate grandfather and it consisted mainly of questions.” Such ones as she remembers had to do with why she wanted to cut down the tree, didn't she realize it was a living being, other trees and animals liked having this tree here, why would she want to hurt the tree and take its life away? She went back to the house to ask her mother about trees and if they could feel, and was told, “No, trees don't feel anything. You can cut it down if you want to.” In Linda's own experience, however, she knew that her mother was wrong and that she had hurt a living, feeling being. This was her only childhood recollection of communications from trees. Forty years passed before she pulled over to the side of the road in Marin, and listened to what the Trees had to say to her.

Often significant memories of non-ordinary reality or active imagination that many people had as children fade, are forgotten, or if the child spoke of them and was made to feel ashamed, the memory becomes associated with pain and is suppressed. It is this very facility—to be psychic, mystic, attuned to energy, or transmissions of feelings or sensations, sometimes images, or intuitive impressions—that can connect adults with Nature and their own authentic nature, at a time when the fate of the planet depends on humans feeling these connections.