The knowing of trees

I have come to a point in my relationship with the land we steward where I talk to trees.
There are two trees in particular.
They are both gums.

They are the grandmother and the mother trees.
They answer back too.
Their energies are different from each other.

The mother tree is the one I go to the most.
I go to her
Sometimes weekly
Sometimes daily
Sometimes less frequently.

How do I describe the way she is?
She has little patience for excuses.
She has firm boundaries.
She expects them to be maintained.
She holds everything within her.
If you like, you can join her ecosystem.
You have to play by the rules.
She won't placate you.
She doesn't hand out gold stars for playing by the rules.

She has little patience for colonisers like me.
Why bother?
We will be gone soon enough.
She expects reciprocity and she doesn't stand for her boundaries being questioned.
I feel like a child again around her.

Within five minutes I knew she wasn't going to stand for me buttering her up.
She didn't care about what I said, she cared about what I did.
And even more importantly WHY I did it and how I did it.

When I ask for permission to do things she doesn't just say YES.
She'll present conditions.
Like yes you can do a burn off, but only if you build a church here
And come to give thanks every week on Sunday.

She means a church like a sacred space,
A space where we revere something bigger and more powerful than ourselves
She chooses words deliberately.
She likes them to have weight and connotation.
She's asking for a space where we can give back.
There's an aspect of weight to what she does.
Like she's giving you a way to engage in reciprocity.
She's kind, but she's firm.
The church isn't a metaphor either.
She's asking for us to worship the ecosystem we rely upon.
She's asking us to literally build a church.
A structure that we work on to make a space to say thank you in.
And I just know she's going to be a tough building client.
For now ceremony will do.
For now naming the space sacred
And returning there at least once a week to be thankful
And acknowledge the significance of the landscape
And our part within it
With seriousness and joy.
Will be enough.
Not forever though.

These are the days now.
And it's hard not to feel that my grip on reality is faltering.
And it's also hard to care.
When your land speaks to you and your trees guide you to be instruments of the land.
And to live your beautiful, tenuous, life dancing in a thriving ecosystem
Until you die and feed everything that fed you
Until you are one.
What more is there than that?