Today I had the great good fortune to hear David George Haskell read from and speak about his newest book, The Songs of Trees. You may know that I feel a deep connection with trees, so of course as soon as I learned about this book I knew I had to attend the talk, held at our wonderful local independent bookstore, Parnassus Books.

The Songs of Trees tells the stories of twelve trees from around the world, including one from Tennessee (he teaches at the University of the South, so not completely surprising). His first book, The Forest Unseen, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is a meditation on a square meter of old-growth Tennessee forest, which he compared to a Tibetan sand mandala in a fascinating talk at the National Academy of Sciences. All great stuff that you might enjoy, too!

What I'm really loving about Professor Haskell's writing is how poetic it is and how it makes science accessible and interesting for the layperson. So far The Songs of Trees reminds me a lot of Mary Oliver's nature essays in Upstream - high praise indeed coming from me!

Are you the fool now?

Sometimes we need to be wrong

so that we can dance.


(The beautiful Fool card is from an old friend, the Aquarian Tarot Deck, illustrated by David Palladini.)

For almost as long as I can remember, I've been scared to death of death. I went through a phase as a insomniac pre-teen where I would lie awake all night, imagining the void. The idea of having no consciousness for the rest of eternity absolutely terrified me. And hand-in-hand with this fear was the sense that I couldn't survive the eventual death of my beloved father. How would I exist in a world he wasn't in? These fears haunted me.

But the truth I've discovered is that even though my dear dad passed away in 2015, I don't live in a world without him. He lives every day in my heart and I often imagine that I can feel his funny, loving presence around me. In fact, I feel like we now have the relationship I always longed for with him. And so my greatest fear has become my most precious gift. I find I no longer fear death. It has made me re-evaluate a lot. I wonder what other great gifts await me. What great gifts await you in this beautiful alchemy of life?

We all need places -

hidden and mysterious -

for our dreams to grow.