On Nature Spirits

This morning as I meandered through the woods near my home, I stopped at a circle of ash trees that I more often than not find myself pausing before. Five of them, nearly perfectly spaced, forming a circle—the kind you want to walk the perimeter of three times and hail the guardians of the elements to make their presence known.

I was carrying a dried sprig of flowers and an apple. Offerings I planned on leaving at the base of a different grove of trees—but as I stood in front of the circle, trees stark and bare, I noticed something—someone—that I wouldn’t have in the warmer months, when the foliage is thick and rich and obscures the true nature of things. Just across the circle from me stood a Nature Spirit. Branches for limbs, sloping horns, tail dragging, covered in moss and lichen and sunshine…and mirth.

I’m not one to readily see faces in inanimate objects—pareidolia—though if pointed out I can easily see the patterns others recognize.

On occasion, however, I am gifted with the vision of a Nature Spirit that is hard to interpret as otherwise. Years ago along the Oregon Coast I was walking back from the ocean at dusk, and in the trees, shaped from stump and limb and leaf, was Artemis. Quiver across her back, bow drawn, hair an unbound tangling of vines and brambles caught in the winds. It was enough to make me gasp—to remind me in a moment where I was achingly tired and second guessing my choices for staying out so far from home, so late—that I was surrounded by magic and beings-other-than. It bolstered my faith…and when I pointed into the trees to my son (who was quite young at the the time) he simply smiled, as though it were the most natural of occurrences, that he witnessed regularly. I realized, he probably did; just as I had, once so many years ago. I never want to lose the gift of having “eyes to see and ears to hear.”

I left the apple at his feet this morning. A recognition. An honoring. An offering.