~ Tree Hugging Nemophilist ~

Nemophilist: a haunter and lover of the woods

Before the Dorian Greeks invaded her territory in the Peloponnese,Helen was a full-fledged goddess whose second name was Dendritus ("she of the trees") From: The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines by Patricia Monaghan

Well! That explains it then!

When I was about six years old, I used to wander off to play with the faeries and tree spirits around the boundaries of my father's fields.

A special stone shining out from all the others would come home to be enjoyed and loved.

I love all trees, but the Beech is a particular favourite and this one, in the far corner of one of my father's fields, is always in my heart.

Tree of my Heart
When I was sixteen, I sat snuggled into her roots, leaning against her trunk, learning poetry for my GCE English Literature exam....'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. What a long poem that is....but I loved literature and still do.
If there were horses in the field they would stand around me, filling my nostrils with their sweet smell, keeping me company, swishing flies away with their tails as I recited words of a world they had no experience of.

She was the very first tree I hugged and felt that deep, slow pulse and aura that trees have.


It makes me so happy that I have always had this deep love and 
connection with friends found in fields, woods and rivers...and so 
very lucky that it was all right there as I stepped out the door.

When I was fourteen, a schoolfriend lent me a book which gave understanding to what I had been doing all my life, and I was certainly not alone in being able to feel pulsing energies from stones and trees
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Trees talk to my hands.
Bark~braille whispering secrets
to seeking fingertips. 
9th June, 2011












Born a child of the woods
where trees were my mother
green leaves my father;
the creatures my siblings,
our playmate ~ the river ~
where days were spent collecting stones,
floating leaves, gathering twigs;
taking strolls through bordering fields,
filled with meadowsweet ~
stretching out on this Queen of the Meadows
~ releasing her honied scent,
singing with crows,
and dancing with butterflies ~
arms spread wide, then flung in a hug
around 
 Oak
 Beech
 Alder
Birch.
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~ HOME ~
4th March, 2012


~

hugger~planter~sitting~under~er of trees

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