I find God in the trees.

It started when I was a girl. I grew up with a tree-lined creek in my Northern California backyard. Every spring, a flush of rains renewed it and then settled into clear pools, just in time for the mating season of thumbnail-sized frogs that bore thousands of tiny blackbead tadpoles. With my hand on the peeling white bark of the sycamores, I could hear it - The wild. The wild, which made me feel small and safe and held, in the same way that a sky full of stars can sometimes do. Later, I would understand that this was connection to the sacred, that this is what some people call prayer. That the feeling of being known and held by the divine that I found among the trees is what many people mean by God and Goddess.

But the trees didn’t talk back. Earth-based spirituality was thin on the ground in those days, and I needed other seekers. When I was twelve, my parents joined a local church and I discovered hymns. Singing together to the divine. Within the music, I found grace and a respite from the agony of adolescence. I cobbled it together: a little private tree time and a song fix on Sundays. It was enough.

When I grew older, my love of the wild led me to environmental activism. I wanted to be in service to the voice that I could almost hear in the branches. Funny how the dream sometimes contains the seeds of its own demise. Fast-forward twenty years and I was in the thick of it. Running environmental campaigns, working to “save” the wild, and all the sacred had drained out of me. Even when we won, I felt small. Not in a staring-atthe- stars kind of way. In a the-forces-of-evil-are-too-big kind of way. The music of the trees, of my connection to the earth, was a distant memory. And part of me had the temerity to say This is the price of success. This is in service to the wild. And another part of me had the wisdom to say, Baloney. I signed up for Mystery School, hoping to begin the journey back.

By Wednesday of the weeklong May Intensive, I was beginning to open again. It didn’t matter that I had only been to Mystery School once before. Three days of seeking together had knit us into community. The story for the year was the old Celtic ballad of Tam Lin and Jennet. That night, like Tam Lin, we were being invited into the land of Faerie.

“In May, Diana’s Grove is a tapestry of green. Can you imagine it? Long mornings of tender sun ripen without burning.

There is a meadow, wide as both outstretched arms can contain. A bank of dark trees rises behind it.”

In May, Diana’s Grove is a tapestry of green. Can you imagine it? Long mornings of tender sun ripen without burning. There is a meadow, wide as both outstretched arms can contain. A bank of dark trees rises behind it. Now, imagine it at dusk. Fill it with the flickering magic of fireflies. It was home, even before I saw the sycamores at the ritual clearing by the creek. We walked to ritual in silence, in twilight. As we walked, we were to leave behind anything that barred our entrance to Faerie, and I plucked them from my chest - filaments of doubt. Fears that I was too small and alone to make a difference. I left them beside the meadow in the gravelly road.

It happened toward the end of the ritual. Our faces were lit by the golden fire, for it was full dark now, and the song began to pour out. “May my breath be a gift to you…Take me home again.” Slowly, easily, we drifted from the fire and each made our way into the night. Our voices lengthened and spread, threads of connection that lay loosely over the land.

And I? I found myself at the foot of a grove of sycamores away from the fire. The trunks were not white. They were silhouetted against the sky and their branches made black lace against the blue velvet night. I sang. I felt the words pouring out of me, not just from my lips, but from the glowing, emptying whole of me. And I remembered what I’d known, but never said aloud, all those years ago standing by my own, forgotten trees. “I’m yours,” I whispered, looking up at the branches holding the crescent moon. “I’m yours,” I sang.

And then I heard, calling and reaching for me, a voice that said “I know.”

It was a voice as silent as earth, filled with love and power. And I sang on, joyful instead of lost, knowing that the earth, the magic of the wild, is so much bigger than I am. I am in service to the God in the sycamores, to the song of hope we are all singing. It is enough.