The magnificent forests of my early childhood first sprouted in the pages of books. Raised in suburban Oklahoma, there were plenty of trees, but never a spanning, interwoven community of wooded giants that I could walk beneath and amongst, as I longed to do.
For years after we could read on our own, our dad continued to read aloud to my brother and I before bed. The books I remember most clearly: The Dark is Rising series; The Ear, The Eye and the Arm; The Hobbit; and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which we read at least twice.
The last time my father read Tolkien’s words and worlds to us aloud was the year we moved with him to Nantucket. I was eleven, my brother nine, and in the waning evenings of autumn we three sat together in the light cast out from the bronze floor lamp, the words and the voice who spoke them comfortingly familiar in a way that our new home was not. Our living room was small and, fitted with bunk beds, doubled as Nathan’s and my bedroom. Dad sat in the reclining chair, Nathan and I sat on the floor or the bottom bunk.
I spent a lot of time reading silently and alone, too, but when I attempted to read Tolkien’s books, my young mind stumbled over many of the words, which pulled me out of the fantasy and into the mental acrobats of deciphering symbols on the page. Sometimes this was an enjoyable challenge. But I preferred, any day, hearing the story through the vessel of my father. Delivered orally, it was as though Tolkien’s world arrived directly into my imagination and I could float along the story like a leaf in a river. My mind was free to inhabit and explore and I lingered in my favorite scenes as Dad read on. I ducked again through Bilbo’s round door. Kept bobbing with the dwarves in their barrels. Climbed once more into Treebeard’s branching crown. Grew drowsy with Frodo and Sam in the foothills of Mordor. Apart from the barren land of Mordor, the entire series took place in my mind in an unending forest, not so different from Tolkien’s intention perhaps, but lacking any sophisticated topography of valleys and mountains. I was content imagining a world of ubiquitous, uniform trees.
In addition to reading us books, Dad required that we spend the daylight hours primarily outside. If there was not a hurricane or a blizzard, we biked to our destinations. We learned to identify edible mushrooms and trim the trails around the house. We carried jugs of water to his research plots, mowed meadows, and often, simply, played.
I can remember the subtle feeling, though I couldn’t have articulated it then, that being outdoors in the daylight and reading in the evening didn’t feel entirely like separate experiences. I brought the stories with me out into the world, not by play-acting specific characters or scenes, but by a continued experience of the land as the place where stories could happen. We played a lot of specific games in the pitch pine forest that grew around our new house: capture the flag, fort-building, hide and seek. But, mostly, I remember simply carrying around an undefined but certain sense of possibility when outdoors, like there was a myth or two draped in the trees with the lichen or scurrying away just out of the corner of my eye.
After dinner, I brought the land back inside with me as I listened to my father read. Tolkien’s forests took on more subtlety and clarity as I increasingly came to have my own experiential vocabulary of the woods, even without the words to express it.
The place where the books and the land met was through my imagination.
As children, it’s easy to flow wordlessly between imaginative landscapes and physical ones. These terrains might be separate one moment, seamlessly merged the next. Just as Aspen, at eleven months old, said “Hi!” to all of the beings around our house, at two-and-a-half years old, the conversations continue. Her world remains deeply animate; primed for story. At any moment, anything might speak to her and she will unhesitatingly speak back. Just the other day, she met one of her favorite storybook characters of late, Old Rock, at a community garden in New Hampshire. We were admiring some of the boulders placed throughout the little landscape, and there he was. “Hi, Old Rock!” she said, without blinking an eye that was there. “How you doin?”
I’m curious how our imaginations meet the landscape and how the landscape finds its way into our imaginations. And what potential lies in those encounters.
Recently, Aspen and I were in the backyard, seeing what was to be seen in the middle of March. We noticed that one of last year’s red maple seeds—which had lain dormant on the ground for months and had been recently revealed again as the last of the snow melted—had a little green shoot growing out of it.
I explained to her that this seed could grow to become a tree. At first, she gave me a questioning look, as if waiting for me to say, “Haha, no, not really!” (I can understand her initial disbelief…that an entire tree could come from something that I was holding in the palm of my hand). But then I saw her face change as she not only accepted this astonishing fact, but…as she looked at this seed and then imagined a tree. I could almost see it grow right there in her mind.
And that imaginative act suddenly seemed as miraculous to me as the potential for a tiny seed to grow into an enormous, long-lived forest being. Here was a child who could look at something small, brown, brittle, and wing-shaped, lying still in her mother’s hand, and conjure a tree in her mind.
And this is what we need, isn’t it?
I’ve been working on a definition of ecological mothering and I keep coming back to two things as I do: forests and books. Which, I think, has been my way of working around to an understanding that practices of ecological mothering are necessarily both communal and imaginative.
This is what I’ve been writing about in my book for the last few weeks. I had known this chapter was going to be about trees, but I’d had no idea it was really going to be about imagination. That’s some of the joy of writing, though. And I’ve been returning to some of my favorite fantasy stories as I work through this chapter. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series and my beat-up old copy of The Hobbit. In the meantime, the maple seeds are sprouting everywhere, flowers are beginning to bloom, soft rain is falling. I’m working to re-find those seamless moments where imagination and land are one.
News
Speaking of trees, if you’re in the Portland, Maine area, I hope you’ll come to Back Cove Books on May 12th at 7pm! I’ll be joining Katie Holten on her national book tour for her—already bestselling—The Language of Trees (which I’m honored to have an essay in!).
More info here!
Reading / Listening
The Dark is Rising was adapted into a 12-part BBC radio drama! (No surprise, Robert Macfarlane had a lot to do with it.)
Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea series. One of those collections to be read on repeat every few years.
Essential Labor by Angela Garbes which explores “mothering as social change,” and so much more.
The magic of story-telling, and story-listening. Each is dependent on the other. We think the listening is passive, but it isnt, its hugely participatory, both working together to conjure the story to life. Its such a powerful experience, as you have shown, that can stay with us long after the story is told. This is a lovely piece of writing. Thank you for sharing it with us. 💕
Chelsea, I love what you say about "… the land as the place where stories could happen." As a grandmother to someone who is Aspen's age, I understand what you mean! It's an honor to walk in a world rich with waiting stories.
Your thoughts remind me of Joy Harjo's enchanting little book, Secrets from the Center of the World. In it, Joy responds to a series of Stephen Strom's photographs of Dinétah, the Navajo homeland. She reveals story after story about the desert — none of which are obvious in the photographs. You have to learn to look at the land with new eyes.
Thank you for sharing your writing with us. Your emerging book sounds wonderful!