Hemlock . change

some thoughts from years of loving Hemlock

I have been loving with, on, to, and alongside Hemlock for over a decade. They are maybe the first tree who I really fell in love with, not knowing back then in 2014 as my marriage was cracking apart and climate change was, as now, looming darkly, that they would be my gateway tree friend, who would gently, coolly, flexibly usher me into ways of knowing a vegetal being, of being kin with a tree, something that still feels mysterious, indescribable, outside of brain thought…

Here is a thing I wrote in 2014: a letter to Hemlock and Woolly Adelgid, introducing them to each other and to me, cut out of a 120’ length of black nylon that flew as the tail of a 6’ black nylon kite over the meadows and forests of the Saint-Gauden’s landscape in New Hampshire:
In a forest deep with Hemlock and White Pine, sensing the scattering of the forest ants and the six-spotted tiger beetle in your leaf litter. Together we hear the purple finches and Eastern Towhees busy in your limbs. I see a wood turtle amble by, startling a blue-spotted salamander. You are central to all this, a foundation species, holding all these beings fast in interconnectedness too vast for us to unravel here. And yet it unravels.

And here is a thing I wrote in 2021 as part of inquiry and reflection prompts from a mind-expanding course I took called Vulture: Courting the Other/Wise in a Time of Breakdown:
I am in northern Vermont with almost no wifi, or I would send a picture or two of a baby Hemlock I came upon in the forest. Not the only one. This baby was nestled at the foot of a mother tree. I had been noticing that the Hemlocks had no or few cones in this part of the forest, tho nearby, there was one in more sun with tons of adolescent cones—light lovers. I had been thinking about migration and how Hemlock’s cast their cones in a smaller radius than many evergreens, so they spread much more slowly (but more densely?)… And here was a baby Hemlock, who we rarely see in Boston these days. I moved around this baby, in prayer, in protection, in connection. I crouched and gazed through the blueish light, listened in the windless grove, felt the cool damp….

And I’ve made ink with Hemlock for over a decade: from some fallen trunks at a superfund site in Concord, MA; from the forest in Vermont; from the slowly dying Hemlock in my front garden that I looked out on through the pandemic…

And when I first started to sit with Hemlock for this project in 2023, I wrote:

We can flourish like Hemlock when we are grounded in rich earth, 
when our limbs are flexible in adversity, 
when we offer shelter to others, when we reach for the light, 
when we balance between our masculine and feminine, 
when we find it hard to tolerate toxicity, 
when we are hopeful in the face of uncertainty, 
when we create our own forest of mystery.

I’m excited to share that I’ll be offering a winter solstice Urban Tree Oracle gathering with Hemlock in the dark at my studio on 12/21 at 5:30-7:30pm, register here. We will meet my Hemlock living in my front garden, sit together around a solstice fire, burn natural objects to become charcoal, participate in a guided meditation score written with artist Patte Loper, and draw with Hemlock to make our own oracle cards, distilled sparks of the experience we had with Hemlock to take with us.

I hope to see you there.