
Dear Subscribers, New and Old -
Welcome, welcome to this little nook in the forest. I’m so grateful you’re here. It’s such a thing of beauty and magic to have a space where we can walk together into big questions, the questions I believe are essential to this time, and the times to come. I hope the messages I share can be of benefit, and I’d love to hear how they arrive for you. Please reach out anytime - let’s keep weaving this web together.
In a circle, sometimes, our bodies and hearts know we’re not alone. In the forest, we might feel it too. Sometimes even a moment with a lonely parking lot tree - we remember what it is to be a being together with another.
I sat not long ago with a group of women who are grieving, and also houseless. We were in a (sort of) quiet room at the day shelter. Lamps quickly set up for light (no overhead fluorescents please), coloring sheets and markers on the tables. Small blank journals were no sooner set down than quickly snatched up, each woman seeing a chance, a space to tell her story, so often otherwise disregarded.
There were tears, and laughter, tissues passed around, and moments of tender care for each other (a few times, a woman even offered care back to herself, but this is all too rare).
After years of facilitating grief groups, I’ve seen again and again: tears, laughter, blame and anger and confusion, tenderness. It’s beautiful, really. And really, it’s a song, a dance, a weaving to tell body and soul: you are not alone. In these spaces, people get to feel, for just a little while - not alone.
Even when they’ve been flung out into a world of pain and loss and sorrow (or grew up rooted in that world), here is one little bit of time to be not alone.
I invited everyone to call to mind and heart a being they feel supported by. I’m often nervous asking this question (what if they look at me like, “what the hell are you talking about?”, but that almost never happens). Instead, people are ready and happy to tell about their special ones: river, tree, stone, air, Jesus, Buddha, Grandma. Living in a shelter or motel, these ones can feel and be very far away - oceans, planets, light-years away. For that one little bit of time in a circle in a room in a shelter, we called them in, held them close, and let their care be present for all of us.
These times when we gather, even with strangers, we build a bridge to each other.
We build a bridge from a place called alone, then walk across it. For a little while, we get to live in together. We get to belong.
Oh to be not alone. To be - not just not alone, but surrounded, included, cared for, tended to.
How many are searching for places to be not alone? (I don’t mean the chosen kind of alone, the kind that can be respite and nourishment and rest. I mean the kind of alone that is unchosen, thrust upon us. The kind of alone where the care and attention of others has seeped away, withered, maybe never grew. The kind of alone where we can’t feel anything other than unseen and unheard, unheld).
For so many, in certain seasons or just always - this bone-deep aloneness is the only companion. To be not alone, where do we go? When we’re grieving and our heart is aching, who is there to witness? This is when my heart says: turn to the trees.
Much of how I work with grieving people is just gently reminding them of the world that surrounds us. Everything can become so constricted when we’re hurting, and the hurting can cause us to pull in and away. Maybe we need this pulling away, for a while. At some point though, many of us want to move again, to connect again, to be heard. Sometimes, the humans in our lives just aren’t able to be there in the ways we need them to.
But sitting with a tree or plant, supported by earth below, we can turn our attention out and around. Cool air moves around us, lifting and turning leaves, holding birds aloft - we breathe it in, our cells opening to all that we share, all that we are offered. Our cells and souls remember that even in our own bodies, we are always more than just ourselves.
We’re aching for the others. Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks of our separation from the living world around us:
Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection “species loneliness”—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.
Have you felt this? The seeking for someone, something that can hold you, tend the wounds, respond when you call out?
If you have, (and I say this unironically), you are not alone.
When we go into the forest, and allow ourselves to cross into a time other than ordinary (we might call it sacred), we may uncover something remarkable (and mundane): the forest is listening. The trees and the plants know you are there, and (if you enter with care and respect) welcome you. Something else: they want you, too, to listen. They want to be heard, seen, cared for as a relative.
Just listen - they are calling.
We can mourn our forgetting; mourning is one way to be in right relationship. Our tears and our wails crack us open in places that were frozen. Rain falls and dissolves what was solid. Howls fall from our mouths, circling the globe with the breath of the wind. We are woven back in, our grief and joy welcome, warp and weft of the whole cloth.
For too long, for too many of us, our conversations, our space to mourn, to sing and laugh and cry with the more-than-human world have been silenced. We’ve been taught that the world is just a backdrop, just scenery or products. They’ve tried to snuff out the powerful magic of kinship and care, and claim that power for themselves. We take it back when we drop into sacred, even silly time with Others. When we stop, sit, speak from the heart, and listen, the world turns toward us. We turn toward them. The Elders of all species remind us:
You belong here. You belong to this world. You are not alone.
I hope you can take this with you, remember this, today and every day.

Upcoming offerings
If you’re interested in the more-than-human world, being not alone in grief, and writing in a gentle and supportive space, I hope you’ll join Shapes of Nature: Writing for Grieving Hearts. Let’s explore how shapes and patterns in the natural world can help us make meaning of our grief and lives. I’m co-facilitating this workshop with brilliant human and my dear friend Robin Lanehurst. Meets monthly for five sessions, beginning June 19th.
In partnership with the Portland Grief House, I’m offering a free monthly Parent Loss Circle beginning June 24th. I hope you’ll join if this can be supportive to you.
I love to work with groups and organizations to design trainings and retreats for your people. Email me to talk about options!
AI policy
I’ve been seeing other writers share their AI policies, and I thought it was time I share mine too. First: I am so very honored to have a space to share some of what the world is teaching me with you. I feel incredibly privileged to have a bit of time and space to write. It’s also a very tender, vulnerable, scary thing to do, but it feels important - I feel lovingly pushed to it by ancestors and kin of all kinds. With all this as the foundation, using AI for my writing feels wrong. I’ve heard it said, “Why should I bother to read something you couldn’t be bothered to write?”
What matters to me is connection and real, messy, imperfect, confusing, beautiful relationship. I want that in all realms of life. So here at Rose and Cedar Forest, I don’t (knowingly) use AI for research, images, or writing - for anything. On top of the relational issues, the use of AI has huge impacts on the environment (actually, that’s a relational issue too). For so many reasons, I want to stay here, in this human and more-than-human realm with you. Please reach out if you have thoughts or questions about this.
with love, heather
I love seeing you on substack and love learning from all the ways you are clarifying.
“We build a bridge from a place called alone, then walk across it. For a little while, we get to live in together. We get to belong.” Beautiful. And I love the reminder that we have to take those steps to cross the bridge.