Bone crowned water stag, shadow wearer, keep my senses sharp in your groves. Meek as a mendicant is the walker in the woods who knows of you, hidden giants. Twig eater, fierce mother, who brings your trust and tender babes to my door, may the Watcher of the Woods favor you and your children with strong legs, keen ears, and munificent summers.

Lodgepole, thin, unbent, Ponderosa, copper skin, perfumed as burnt sugar, Blue Spruce, ethereal, familial, silver needled, Douglas Fir, whitebearded, usnea-bearded, great grandmothers, make me a child again at your feet beneath your gathered council. Some hunger to climb beyond your crowns so to stand upon the skulls of gods, mine is a thirst to lay curled in your laps, lapping, lapping, at the gospel of your dark roots.

Earth shivers, wind whispers, in aspen leaves. The first and last Hierophant.  Great psychopomp whose thousand-eyed children watch unblinking, time’s spiraling dance. Aspen, quivering from so much knowing, from so many ages spent…watching. Watch over me, watch through me, beloved Ancient, so that I too, may see with a thousand eyes. 

King you have been called. Grandfather, grandmother, ancestor. From the cradle I have known you. For reasons unknown it was decided from my infancy that Bear would be my warden in this life and we have shadowed one another since. You, master of dreams, of resurrection, my loyal guide through these caves, through to the otherworld, remind me always that much occurs below the reach of what is seen. Beneath Winter’s flesh, in your nearness to death, dwelling on the brink of it, you elude it. Come spring, you are reborn. Great friend, may you be born again and again. 

You, with feathers the complexion of the fertile void. Winged shape changer, twin shadow, whose brother sweeps the earth, whilst you the breathy welkin, constellating all memory and thought, constellate me with your knowing of that which can only be revealed in blackness, in raven, as stars are birthed in the gloaming.

Stepping into the lilac snow, arms full with nut and seed. Singing a spell to call the Others in, It sounds like my great grandmother, whose songs I never imbibed. You, the first to respond, a mouth filled with your own name.
Chick-a-dee-dee-dee. Dee-dee.
Chick-a-dee.
Yours was the first name I learned, my own, second. You, who taught me to sing my own name

You who had already stood for an estimated 79,770,000 years when my first homo sapiens ancestors were born. You, who has cradled glaciers, dinosaurs, the first mammals, fires, ice ages, me; you, world shaper. Grant me always humility at your feet, at your enormity. May I rest in your shadow and remember myself small within it, may I know time as you know time so that I am humbled when I learn that even the small are vast. 

Once we knew, and quickly forgot, that life and living is not clash and combat, only. Once we knew, and quickly forgot that life and living emerges over and over again through the risk of desiring more…life. And to live is to merge and be merged with. Once we knew and it was you who resurrected memory of what we are, and we are each of us, chimeras, hybrids, holobionts. Lichen, illuminator of symbiosis, incarnation of Ubuntu, “I am because we are.” Resurrect in us now, memory of a deeper law: a symbiognosis. 

Prayers to you ancient one, taker and giver of life. Prayers in summer for your distance and mercy, prayers in winter for your nearness and warmth. Great igniter of inspiration, of awakening, you who has lended us your terrible power, I see your fury. May yours be the light which guides us from where we have strayed so very far from one another. May it summon us to gather round you once more, friends and strangers, and feed you again with story, with song, with poetry..