The Standing Earth Elders
living through change
Looking outside my window, pockets of snow still offer partial cover, allowing brown grass and sphagnum to appear only in patches.
Strong and bare, the trees wave in sudden gusts of wind. But even with these sporadic gales, the land is barely more than a whisper.
It makes the urgency in the heart of humanity even more palpable.
And the movements of the great cycles do not yield to the Lady of Winter.
But they do trade secrets often.
Today I caught one of those whispered truths on the wind:
a message from the Standing Nation, the Trees.
It was no more than a nudge,
but sometimes those are the loudest.
It was a reminder that these ancient beings so many of us feel drawn to hold great wisdom—and that in times of change, we are invited to remember them as our Elders.
They urge us to listen, to remember, to be.
This is not an invitation to do something.
This is an invitation to look to our elders to see how they live, and how they have weathered storms. They have witnessed the rise and fall of empires. They have lived through collapse.
They live as witnesses, rooted in place, deeply woven into the Earth’s soil.
They remain attuned to the pulses of the Living Web.
With their branches, they reach toward the heavens, but they do not get lost there. They remain in relationship with the community around them.
They are keepers of continuity and wisdom—not answers and solutions.
We don’t have to have all the answers either. The pieces of the puzzle fall into place on their own time.
Humans are just one race here—and one of the youngest.
We have elders here with us—the trees, the plants, the ancestral spirits, and the land and Earth herself—who have lived through collapse. Who have remained rooted when familiar ways of orienting no longer work.
The elders of the Earth don’t brace.
They don’t interpret.
They don’t avoid.
They endure.
Last year, while in England on one of my walks through the Somerset fields, I stood in awe as a stand of old English Oaks began to sing.
I heard them as a choir of baritone voices. I don’t always hear words to the tunes that come through, but this time I did—deep guttural voices like sleeping giants awakening after a long slumber in the Underworld:
We are the Mighty Oaks of Yore,
We stand here still and strong . . .
The song continued on,
and the rest of the lines are better shared at another time.
I’m thinking about them now.
As I look outside at the Standing Elders here on the land I live on.
I’m remembering that there are other ways of being with change.
Other ways of being in relationship.
This way of working with land—in active relationship with places and the beings who dwell there—has shaped my life and work for many years.
It has been learned through long intimacy, through speaking and listening, through call and response.
Most of this work lives privately.
And there are times when the land itself asks for it to be taken up more deliberately,
in circle, with others who recognize the same living current.
I can feel one of those times drawing near.