University of the Trees, Oxford, 27 June 2010
Four of us met in the usual place – Jackdaw Lane, the entrance to Aston’s Eyot – on an idyllic, warm, sunny June evening. Two of us had not been to a UoT group for some months, two had been coming regularly. We greeted each other, waited to see if more people would arrive, then wandered onto Aston’s Eyot to look for a place to be with the trees. The undergrowth had taken over since I had last been here in early Spring: the nettles had grown to shoulder height, and the cowslips were over my head. I couldn’t believe we would ever find a clear enough area where we could sit down under the trees.
We walked along the main paths around the Eyot; without discussing explicitly what we were looking for we found we were in consensus – keeping away from places where there were other people, following each other exploring down little paths through the undergrowth into the wooded area. Eventually we found ourselves, at the end of a little path, emerging into a small grove, where the ground was not flat but hummocky, and the trees were small and grew in spindly pairs, twining around each other, almost clinging together, and their leaves formed a canopy overhead. That’s why it was dark enough that few plants grew underneath and we could sit on the ground. Round the edge, nettles grew high, shielding our sitting place from anyone walking along one of the main paths.
We sat down and intuitively fell into silence for perhaps half an hour, listening, smelling the air, really seeing the different colours and watching the shadows change as the sun moved slowly down in the sky – and really feeling ourselves sitting in this place. We heard a dear snorting nearby (later we saw the deer, twice; being so still we presented no threat and she came quite close barely seeing us).
When we began to talk we reflected on a variety of aspects of being in this space.
We talked about how we had collectively intuitively agreed to find a hidden-away space, free of evidence of other people.
We talked about how the whole of Aston’s Eyot used to be landfill, yet despite that some of us felt less alienated from the earth in this spot than in others we had visited, perhaps because there was no human debris on the ground. We realised that the rubbish dumped here, so long ago, had been mostly made of glass, pottery – reconstituted earth materials, no plastics or oils, very little metal.
We felt the quiet of this dark place with the light around the edge dappled as it reached us through the leaves above and to the sides, and reflected on how darkness has a place in our lives that we rarely acknowledge. And that the movement to reach this dark place – exploring little pathways through the mass of brambles – was so different from the more brutal movement of fairytales like Sleeping Beauty – in which the prince hacks through the thickets to ‘rescue’ the princess. We thought about how words like ‘sinister’ and ‘spooky’ embody not the truth about being in dark places but our culturally wrought fear of being in a dark place, and how the reality of accepting this darkness was so rich and alive.
And even in this dark place where the light cannot reach and the wildness cannot grow and the earth sits atop an old rubbish dump, the trees are communicating with each other, underground, via the networks of roots and the fungi that support them.
We wondered what it would be like to sleep in a wood, amongst the trees. And a quick discussion about where we could do this made us realise that it’s not easy, these days, to find woods that are accessible to all, and not privately owned with restricted access. We decided to investigate and find a place where we can spend a night with trees.
