When The Tree Calls (Part 1)

And you think you answered too late...

The lovers - my favourite trees in Zalanpatak

The sweet chestnut trees of my childhood in a small Dutch village, where I went foraging every autumn with my best friend. The giant old oak tree in New England I could not let go of. Our midnight visit to the largest and oldest fig tree in Sydney, before saying goodbye to my brother and flying back. The virgin forests of Transylvania that are calling me home.

With my birthday now fast approaching, and with a “terminal cancer diagnosis" renewed on file, it feels differently this year. “normally” I don’t like making a fuss on my birthday. I throw a party only once every five years. All other years I indulge in all my whims. Only one tradition I honour: Stolen Flowers. (No, not watching the brilliant movie starring the formidable Bill Murray and Jeffrey Wright, that is the Jim Jarmush jewel “Broken Flowers”).

Born on a Sunday, with all shops closed, anyone who came to visit mum and me in the Red Cross hospital, brought picked and stolen flowers, from the roadside to the cemetery, whatever was found on the way. I steal myself a few flowers every birthday. But there is more to the story, as they say.

There is a legend in my family that says I was found on the beach.

I think about walking on the beach of the Oosterschelde (where the best lobsters live) with my grand dad and listening to him tell me the story of my origins. With a straight face he recounted how on Sunday July 7th 1977 he went fishing early in the morning. He heard a strange sound and scoured the shore until he found where it came from. Right there, wrapped in seaweed was a newborn baby. Me. Tiny and loud, still roaring with the rolling waves that had washed me to shore. Meant to be, grand dad said. Fate had brought us together.

Breathless I listened. I can't have been more than five or six years old. I couldn’t believe it. Grand dad yelled out to my father, then to my uncle, then to all the other family members gathered on the beach that day, and they all confirmed:

I was a foundling. I came from the sea.

It is still the only place in this country that can move me to tears. I uprooted myself a long time ago and no longer really feel that Dutch anymore (feral, my dad calls it), but Zeeland, the shore along the Oosterschelde will always hold the same mythical proportions as my grandfather did. Oh word, the stories I could tell you about him (I surely will, must, another time….).

Apart from tall tales he passed something else onto me: the woods. He comes from a line of forest rangers. Free spirited, rough and ready men, who took no prisoners. Men who still knew how to survive in the wild. Grandpa is the closest I guess I will ever come to something resembling hero worship. It’s due to him, I believe, that trees are in my blood. I speak their language.

They tell me all they see.

My mother knows this. One of my favourite books is “Around the world in 80 trees”, co-authored by Lucille Clerc and Johnathan Drori, which my mother secretly bought for me at the botanical gardens in Sydney and then handed to me after our visit to the fig tree.

In my years in Transylvania I had become so used to being in the valley, cloaked by the woods, that I had slowly started to take them for granted. The way the leaves whisper in the wind, the way the lovers hold each other tight. How my dog scours and hides under the bed, when in late fall the loggers come, because Stella does not like the way the earth trembles when her giant friends fall to the ground.

One of my favourite things of living the way I do, or did, is heating my house with a small cast iron wood burner. These little beasts are brilliant, and nobody should underestimate their power. Also, there is something different about a home with a single source of heat. Everyone gravitates towards it in winter. It becomes the hub, the heart. And slow, stove top cooking is the most nourishing thing I can think of after a three hour hike through the snow.

My cast iron Dovre wood burner

When I left my home this time last year, I did that out of survival. I could not stay a day an hour or a minute longer. My nervous system would have collapsed beyond repair, my soul would have left. I am still learning what all these experiences meant. And again, there are the trees, the faithful trees that tell me: trust us, it will be ok.

When I left Romania, late August 2024, I had just quietly spent just over a year working on a huge fiction project. I will not disclose any details, but it may tell you something in terms of what that means to me, if I share this: When I was told last October that I am dying, the first thing I thought was: No, it can’t be. I have at least seven books to write (yes, I am not kidding, the story I am working on has 7 instalments).

When my oncologist offered me a new perspective, opening the door to how I live with my body, my world, my everything, reminding me that “with you we never know what will happen, so we’re not drawing any conclusions now”, the relief that I can still write made me entire being tingle and light up.

Gently easing myself into the story, back into asking all the questions, weaving the web, and doing the research I came across this book: “Plant spirit medicine: A journey into the healing wisdom of plants” by Elio Cowan, founder of the Blue Deer centre. Late at night, after the world went quiet, with my heart racing, cat purring on my chest, I would put on my headphones and listen to the audio version of the book. Stunning, soulful and sincere tales of lived experience, magic synchronicities, and “chance” meetings with the most wonderful characters. The natural healers of this world. Most of whom can, of course be found, in the forests.

Eliot Cowan at the Blue Deer centre

There are shamans who work with the substance and the spirit. Others only with the spirit. I started to suss out who the tree spirits in my life are.

Who is talking to me?

I remembered. A few years back my mother had come home from a walk and had sent me a photo of some strange nuts. “Do you have any idea what these are?” We found out they are black walnuts, or “false” walnuts as they are called here in the Netherlands. When for months after that the black walnuts popped into my head daily, I sat down and searched. Who is this black walnut and what does she want from me?

From that moment my mother gathered nuts each autumn and I tried to “make them” sprout. It never happened, in all these years.

For weeks now the black walnut was calling me. I did not want to go see her, dogs in toe. I needed my hands free. I needed to have no distractions. Just her and me.

This last Friday morning I woke up early. I went downstairs to make myself a coffee, and my mother told me she had already walked the dogs. Let’s just say Choccy’s bladder control isnt what it used to be. I made my coffee, cuddled the dogs and sat down on the sofa. As soon as my parents came downstairs for breakfast I said:

I have somewhere to go.

I walked out of our block, past the hockey club, down the lane, through the meadows. I briefly stopped to take come pictures of a herd of cows, lazying in the shadow. I looked at the skyline of the row of trees. My heart sank. Had I lost the plot, or…

Getting closer to the farm house where the majestic black walnut once was, I saw only the willow and the beech. I started slowly pacing up and down the path along the laurel hedge, full of chirping sparrows, mumbling some swear words, when a young man on a bicycle popped up. “Looking for someone?” he asked.

Yes, the tree. Do you know what happened to her?

I found out the neighbour cut her down a few weeks earlier. That was why she had been calling me. “FUCK” I thought. “Does this mean I will be cut down too now?” I had somehow tied my fate to the tree. The young man asked me why I needed the tree. I told him how I had been trying for years to grow trees from the nuts, to plant them in my yard in Transylvania. I also gave him a vague description of her healing properties.

Oh, he said, we had tonnes of seedlings in our yard, but we pulled them all out. The neighbour used to dump all nuts in their compost, and apparently that was what they needed to spring to life. Seeing the look of disappointment on my face, the kind youg man suggested we would go into the garden and look anyway. Maybe they didn’t pull them all.

Wandering around the raised beds, meandering on the would chip paths that were slowly being overtaken by violets and poppies in all imaginable colours, we searched. We talked about the crowdedness of our country, the poor quality of the air, the constant sounds. About his holiday and Slovenia, about my life in Transylvania.

After about twenty minutes we giuve up. I am really sorry he says. While walking me to the edge of the garden, back to the dirt road, he offers: If I see one I will save it for you. I will keep an eye for you on your walks. We say goodbye and I wander back in the direction of my partents’s house. By the time I reach the cows again, and stop to cherish their calm and lazy lounging, the content chewing, their huge tongues popping out to chase the flies from their nostrils, I hear a bicycle bell ringing.

A little out of breath he says: “I told my wife you were looking for the black walnut tree. She says there still is a seedling in the strawberry patch. Do you want to walk back and get her?”

It doesn’t take long to walk back and find her. By the time the young man goes to find something to dig her out with and a pot to put her in, his wife has joined us. Her curiosity about my link to this tree runs a bit deeper, and she doesn’t take vagueness as an answer. Eventually I tell her. I have cancer I need this tree with me. She is a healer (I have since found out most cultures consider black walnut a masculine presence, but I feel her differently).

She isn’t surprised. I understand she says. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

An hour and a half later we have talked about all the things we were meant to share. Another day, ten minutes later, any stretch of time would have let this encounter slip through the cracks. As it turns out one of her close friends is dealing with uterine cancer, and a terminal diagnosis too. Her and I seem to have a lot in common in how we approach this. We both reconnect with our bodies, we don’t assign blame, we take responsibility, we choose to learn, choose to receive all experiences with gratitude for life. We also both have developed an interesting inner dialogue, directly addressing various parts, organs and cells.

When my mother sends a message to tell me dad has found another car he wants to check out with me, I leave, elated, seedling in hand. On the way home, waking ever so slowly, I caress the tender young leaves with my nose, and whisper:

“You will guide us home, I know, you know where you want to grow your roots.