The Yew Meditation

The fourth lecture

On the half-lit empty stage the Doc was hunched on a wooden chair, alone and leaning deep into the roll-up he was sucking on furiously, like some stratchy speed-freak that can't come down.

Suddenly he threw himself at the microphone, standing he began immediately to mumble.

There's been a lot of talk in certain circles about Lycanthropy, skin-switching, shape-shifting. Often in relation to wolves, dogs and crows. Always so gory, nature raw in tooth and claw style experiences. What I'd like to propose now is a more pacifist, creative rather than destructive form of psychic interaction with nature. A greener, more 'vegativative' approach. This new lecture is concerned with what as been termed as Xylanthropy also known as bark-switching and stem-shifting. This being an identification with the psychic resonances and adoption of the symbolic presences of particular trees.

Bella stopped listening. Merlin was standing by the back wall, staring in disbelief, muttering under his breath "Irrepressible! Reprehensible more like."

... But we can be sure that plants are sensitive to sound, are affected by music. We once had a potted Emerald Tree, named B, who always sat in the lightest part of the Living Room, ontop of the speaker stack. When we rearranged the room and put him on a low table in the same position, he lost all his leaves in one week. The same was true of a Spider Plant when we stopped playing Drum and Bass. Evidence of not only a simple awareness of sound, but also of botanic musical taste? Perhaps. Certainly Cannabis plants are responsive to traditional folk melodies played on a silver flute. Just as some plants appear to enjoy human company, Busy Lizzie, for examaple. Others, cacti and Yew Trees enjoy solitude and silence. Cacti dream of burning sunshine, arid sandy wilderness, scorpions to impale, that kinda thing. Yew Trees thrive in the peace of dripping graveyards and deserted walled gardens.

This following piece is an account of a Xylanthropic Yew Tree Meditation executed by one of my ex-students, who sadly now has permanantly abandoned his human persona to join a commune of Olive Trees in Southern Spain. He called the piece Memory Tree.

A yew tree sapling, growing in the corner of a deserted garden, overgrown, untrodden, never-visited.

Growing surreptitiously, unsown, unplanned.

Inside the lifestem of the tiny tree is the peaceful, cellular consciousness of growth, openning leaves. An awareness, similar to the human experience of growing nails or hair. Unthinking, without perception of the sight, sound or taste or smell or sensation of it.

A slow process of cell production, chlorophyll responding to sunlight. Insensate movement towards awareness, living. Roots steady, stem straight, leaves opening and fluttering, embracing light-rays of spring sunshine.

A yew sapling, a majestic weed in a garden world full of fleeting weeds.

Planted, dropped in a white splatt, from the bowels of a perching bird, that had eaten yew-berries at lunch. A resilent seed passing through the birds gut, emerging bathed in shit.

Shat into a lonely corner of that untended garden.

Fallen to earth, planting itself. Digging roots into wet soft earth, and pushing shoots up into the air.

A spark of life, so delicate and vulnerable that it dares only show itself as a mere green glow on a spring morning.

Hush! The child is unfurling first leaves.

Autumn 1999