Picture this: you stand in a grove of trees; rocks, moss, and ferns cradle the massive furrowed trunks that rise from wide roots to soar far above. 
Dappled sunlight reaches you through the variegated green canopy. The predominant scent is rich earth and verdant life. The oak on your right shakes a lobed leaf and you move towards it. Sensations on your skin and through your body signal a change in energy, a warm density as if the tree invites you to communicate. A few tiny winged insects cling to the tree and a line of ants crawls upwards. The oak’s bark is more gray than brown and off-white lichen ascends its narrow crevices.
Is the lichen friend or foe to the tree?
As you pose this question in your mind, a ping and an opening of your heart reads as an answer from the tree: we exist together. Can you touch the bark and lichen? yes.
Wow, you’re communicating with a tree.
How old are you?
Images of this land through time race through your mind. You know: once this land was cleared for farming. This grove in which you stand was spared when a child noticed the natural circle of slender oaks, ten feet high, surrounding a flat rock set into the ground. The trees reached to one another through roots and branches as they grew and no more trees approached. Buildings and human activity grew closer. The roar of machinery vibrates your roots, your core. A bitter metallic taste sprouts on your tongue as a spreader applies chemical to the surrounding rigid rows of corn and soy.
More time passes and the farmhouse decays. Fewer humans encrouch. Silence broken only by the soft feet of squirrels and chipmunks and chatter of birds.
Saplings poke through the soil from squirrel-buried acorns. Family. You reach filaments of roots towards the new ones, aided by the net of fungi underground. Birds and mammals bring other seeds that take root around you. You expand in diversity and exchange sustenance. As years pass, you are a woodland, no longer a single being.
You pull back from this trance-like knowing, walk to the center, and scuff your foot on the composting leaves and duff. Yes, a large flat rock is underneath. Amazing.
You scramble for an important question.
What would you have us humans do for you and the rest of the forest?
Stay in relationship with us. Send more people. Open your hearts and connect in this way. Understand you are part of the network of life that spans Earth, like the mycorrhizae below.
Decentering humans
This, my friends, is a glimpse of what it was like to be part of my recent workshops and a path I offered at witchcamp, Council of Trees: Receiving and Acting on Messages from the Land. I encourage people to be in relationship with the elements, with nature, with other living beings, with the Ancestors. Too often we humans go to non-humans for help: What can you do for me?
Flip that trope!
Open your heart by letting gratitude rise in you. Ask if they will communicate. Listen to the sensations in your body for an answer. Ask what you can do to support them, what they need from humans at this time, how they view the planet, what they would have you know now.