In this original essay for ClimateCultures, poet and writer Joanna Guthrie recalls her time with fellow students on a course exploring connection with trees, their biology, lore, patience and weathering. And deep connection with people, place, love and grief for personal loss and planetary: our links with each other providing the buoyancy we all need.
You can read Joanna’s introductory post for this essay on our blog, “Radical Noticing” – Adding to the Road Map.
What is it about connection? The word, the concept; it keeps on coming by, like a recurrent motif on carriages riding through the darkness. We’ve lost it; we yearn for it; we interrogate the word and its opposite: separation. Connection is everything, all of a sudden. Sometimes it seems like it’s all I’m attending to. Formulated right, it seems like connection could be a key part of our medicine.
In Autumn 2023 I went on a short course called Soulful Connection with Trees. I was so-so that weekend, and connecting with trees, or indeed people, seemed harder than it might. England was experiencing something euphemistically called a heatwave: we had 21 degrees in early October. I didn’t really want to be enjoying such hot sun as I drank my coffee by the canal at Paddington, watching window cleaners scale a new glass building. I hadn’t packed sunblock. I’d had a message on my app early that morning to say the train I’d booked was cancelled. On the next train after the gap, which had to do the work of two, people swapped stories about how delayed their journey was, how upended their plans; how they would now have to get a taxi from Plymouth to St Austell to get to their mother’s. Stories of failed connections. The train was jammed: people stood in line along aisles and sat on the floor of carriage linkages. The sense of chaos and neglect in the network was palpable.
I had a streaming cold descending, and was in a full flourish of grief, my mum having died two months previously. The course was taking place in Dartington, Devon, somewhere I’d lived for a while in the late 1990s, when I was young and waltzing around and full of nerve. I’d worked on Dartington estate for an NGO, illicitly whilst signing on. I’d danced in fields all night long. I’d jumped trains to get back and forth to London to escape the Totnes New Age bubble. But just now, I was the tree damaged in a storm, the one on the edge of the woods that faced out singly, looking the other way. Even so, I was to be shoehorned into a group of a dozen or so assorted humans — something for which I was grateful even in the midst of my ungracious mood.
Ropes of connection
We were to be based at Schumacher College, a venerated seat of alternative learning within the Dartington estate, which has itself been a station of radical thinking, creativity and progressive social organisations since at least the 1930s. It feels like a parallel planet — as does much of this part of alternative South Devon — overflowing with regenerative farming projects, community agriculture plots, people living in vans and yurts, all framed and enfolded by flowing green hills, the Dart bouncing along nearby.
When we arrived, we were directed to a tea-making station and then led out the back, up a slope and into a wood of gigantic Redwood trees, their trunks glowing like masts in the late afternoon sun. Scale shifted; the trees poured upwards and we hunkered at their feet, happily made small. The train journey, and the outside world of metal tracks and networks, fell away.
This alien plantation was planted a century ago by Leonard Elmhirst, the philanthropist who set up much of radical Dartington, for his homesick American wife Dorothy (who was bankrolling him). Our very first exercise of the course was to be blindfolded, led up to one of the Redwoods, and left to hang out with them for a few minutes. I shuffled forward until I bumped into a curve of warm wooden wall. It was like wrapping my arms around a galaxy. If this had been a course on mammals, this was tantamount to immediately being introduced to an elephant. Moving my arms up and down around the trunk, I couldn’t feel any ending to this plant. It felt like the ultimate adult: parental, boundless, and boundlessly strong.
Kara, the course convenor, was part of the altered reality that is the thriving alternative West Country. She spends part of each year tracking with the San people of the Kalahari desert, sometimes as part of a group excursion. The rest of the time she spends living in Wales, making bread out of acorn flour, and so on. Slight, strong and grounded, with a lazy laugh, wearing and sharing her skills lightly, she interrupted herself at one point to say, “Oh, I just heard a shrew!”
As we sat on log stumps in that Redwood grove, landing, Kara delivered something that the Kalahari culture had shared with her. She told us that the bushmen she tracks with have a concept called Tasuki, meaning ropes of connection they perceive between living entities. They say these thicken, from thread to cord to rope, with the build-up of repeated attention to a tree or plant. According to this concept, we run on: the tendrils of our beings trail beyond and between our physical bodies, making us all somehow connected to each other — and to all living things. “We make ropes with all aspects of the creation in that way”, one Bushman says.
(There is an essay to be written, of course, about groups of English people flying to Africa to learn how to connect with nature, and to watch the Bushmen going about their business. The Ju/Hoansi San represent what is generally held to be the oldest community on Earth. They are being systematically squeezed away from their land by the Botswanan government. The UK ‘explorers’ on one package get “ten days deep immersion” in the remnants of this 100,000 year-old culture, followed by “a thrilling 4×4 safari.” Anyway, this is the world we’re living in; this is the kind of thing that is happening.)
In any case I found myself examining my fingertips, flexing and swooshing my hands, to feel the trails, the tendrils. God knows if this was actually what the San people meant, but I liked it. It was a precious answer to things — to being alive. One to add to all the theories of inter-connectedness I collect. Proof. I horde these theories as eagerly as I used to collect stamps in childhood; apparently trying to build up a body of evidence.
We tramped around for the next two days, acquainting ourselves with Birch, Beech, Oak and Ash, first with our eyes and brains, then in other ways. The hills rode high around us. In Totnes, the nearest town, two miles downriver, they rise like bright walls in the distance, making a green fortress around the little town. The Dart passed at the bottom of the little valley: a neighbour.
Kara taught us the rudiments of intuition — or rather, helped us to notice what was there already, sleeping. We sat in a circle while she told us about trees: their biology; their lore; their attributes. Towards the end of the second day, we spent twenty minutes planted up to our ankles in woodland floor, inhabiting the life cycle of a tree, from germination until it finally falls.
Kara calls this ‘treeing’. I felt a sense of the slow times trees exist in: the patience, the weathering; the gratitude for neighbours and elders. I also felt blank, distracted, full of cold; that I missed my mum. It would surely take years to cut through my carapace, my sleepwalking modern life, and be fully present. But there were glimmers.
A river of grief
One morning, showing us various objects she felt we should experience, Kara passed a fox pelt around the circle. Its black leathery button nose, its redoubtable whiskers, its ears. The lush softness of its fur. I didn’t want to let it go, and something in its presence made me cry. What was that? Tenderness, which is like nostalgia, which is like homesickness, which is like grief. Grief; which can be everywhere you look when you’re grieving. And I’m not sure you can engage with the other-than-human world now without grief being present, even just as a flicker in the grass.
In the Anima mundi, the philosophy which holds that universe has a soul which links to human souls, grief would necessarily be a collective pool, a river flowing from the human to the other and back again. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, which looks at “the sacred work of grief”, psychotherapist Francis Weller talks about our “shared grief” for the planet; he believes this causes “a daily diminishment…which is rooted in our psyche.” I think that’s true. Weller offers a comforting take on grieving (the book is predicated on the necessity of grief-tending, and the positives of doing this together). He says grief “keeps the heart flexible, fluid, and open to others”; that it “frees us to feel our kinship with the loving presence around us.”
I wouldn’t presume to insist on this across the board: individual grief is personal. But maybe our collective grief for what we’ve lost, what we’re losing in our world, can bring power. As with XR’s Red Rebels, who appear in another essay in my collection: Sophie Miller, the activist who helped dream them up, describes their purpose as “an expression of the grief of the people, that’s locked in at the moment.”
Kae Tempest, in their essay collection On Connection (like I say: that word), sets out one of their book’s intentions as being “in praise of people gathering to feel, together.” We’re into doing this; it’s what we do. Kae Tempest knows something about harnessing this, and has been doing so since the age of 18: at their gigs, I have looked around me and everyone I can see is in tears.
Is grief boring? Yes, sort of, a bit. And it’s a broad stroke. Unpeel grief and you find love, which coats tenderness, which coats a desire for connection. Red Rebels talk of how when enacting their role, they feel “a deep grief and a deep love.” According to Tasuki, this is us on a systemic, atomic level — it’s more than a desire for connection; our inter-connectivity trails from us like cobwebs, like static electricity, whether we know it or not, looking for somewhere to ground.
So perhaps a medicine for some grief — wider climate and ecological grief — is being open to acts of connection. There’s a Rumi poem I love called ‘Birdwings’. In it, Rumi writes about “Your grief for what you’ve lost“. He says:
Your hand opens and closes, and opens and closes
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralysed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding
The two as beautifully balanced as bird wings.
Acts of connection ease the paralysis, and on a good day might help us to feel the contracting and expanding, the “beautifully balanced” hands like birdwings. And grief, says Francis Weller, keeps the heart open to connection. So grieving oils the wheels of connection.
We don’t want things we love to disappear without trace. But they might. They will. They do. Meanwhile, a sense of our links with each other is an intangible device, a non-fungible token, forming part of the buoyancy we need.
∞
Schumacher College is a big old manse, capacious enough for a couple of wood-panelled libraries, common reading areas, corridors of bedrooms. Above a huge stone fireplace there’s a framed picture of Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet who encouraged Leonard Elmhirst, his sometime secretary, to buy the place. Someone told me the location was partly chosen because of the cream teas.
Students live together in close community; this is part of the experiment. There’s a toast station for hungry students, with home-made bread, and jars of condiments which included a jar of nettle seeds to sprinkle on top. Twice a day a vegetarian meal is cooked by students and kitchen staff, announced with the banging of a gong which hangs from a brass hand screwed into the wall of the dining room.
All meals are communal. At supper on the first evening, I sat next to a short-haired Argentinian woman in her late twenties (the age I was when I lived round here), who was volunteering at the college. The college was in a well-publicised mire of financial implosion, and had to cancel that year’s MA course at short notice. The Argentinian woman said she hadn’t tried a cream tea yet, but was off to do so the next day, with some urgency. She asked me where best to go, for this, whether seaside or inland is best, and I said, anywhere. Cream teas can also be good medicine.
Meanwhile, while we tucked into bean chilli, baked potatoes with sour cream, and took green salad from a bowl the size of a large sink — Schumacher’s food is mostly grown on the estate, across the lane — she told me how it’s been for her, being here at a time of crisis; for the college, although quickly we realised we were talking about wider crises than that.
Resilience myths
She’d been observing the differences between how Argentinians react in crisis, and how people here in England seem to. She said her country has known so much crisis – “We’re used to it”, she said.
“So you’re… resilient?” I asked this hesitantly, as the word is such a go-to in activist circles, and increasingly seen as a bit harsh, a bit meaningless; a bit macho.
“Yes, resilient. But you can have too much of that. We’ve become good at living in community, at adapting. But too much of that can make you sick,” she said, “and I believe we’re becoming sick.”
“Because you run on adrenaline?”
“Yes. After too much, you can’t do it anymore.” She ventured that she felt resilience is a myth: that it’s not that simple. She said feelings and emotions are expressed “very directly and easily” in her country — “with drama”, she added.
I got the impression she found this more efficient than what she’d seen here in recent weeks, which, as you might guess, consisted of a lot of feelings being held back by the Brits, even these alternative-thinking ones. She described someone emerging from a meeting about the survival or otherwise of this hugely-loved college, and saying “Oh, not too bad. Fine.” Then they’d describe what had happened in there, “And I’d say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t sound fine at all.'”
Also at our table were two young men of about nineteen, one from Milan and the other from Plymouth, both embarking on a three-year sustainable farming degree. They listened quietly to our conversation, turning their attention to it unselfconsciously before rising to clear the table for everyone. When they talked of soil systems, as an example of what they’d be studying, it was matter-of-fact and comfortable — this care for the land being as common sense as if they were learning medicine.
Walking back up the hill to our digs, it being a starry night, three of my course-mates, one of whom was a middle-aged man from the Bronx who had a dog tag on a chain around his neck and wore his white sports socks pulled up to his calves in that American way, discussed astrology, and the way that the discovery of different planets coincided with different phases of history. Their conversation became more spongey and next-level; I walked near them quietly, appreciating their desire to study the meaning of the sky and its influence on human life, without feeling any desire to learn more. It was enough that they were doing it, alive and multifarious as they were.
A net of lights
I’d booked the course wanting to deepen my relationship with trees, which I’ve been working at for years but is as slow as oaks to grow. But the main connection I took away with me was with people, after all. That weekend in Dartington, talking to younger men and women from Milan, Buenos Aires, Thessaloniki, Bern, Kochi, Tucson, I had the image — not for the first time — of a net of lights which represents the people tucked away here and there, all over, doing what they can for the good.
The net of lights is hard to break, it seems to me; it flutters rather than snaps. It is out there whatever happens, actually. And the net is irreducible; you only have to know it’s there to feel some benefits, some comfort.
In this way we can be our very own orchard, our very own shoal of fish stretching as far as the horizon and beyond. The poor old mycelium network is summoned up so much now, but it’s a cliché because it’s a powerful engine of truth. Points of human connection are the beginning and end of our presence on the planet we are grubbed in together as humans — quite apart from the general grubbing-in of all lifeforms, from ants to reefs to tigers. Perhaps if we know the tendrils of connection are there we can unclench our fists, flex our birdwings, and feel the tug along the line — know that we are not altogether alone even sitting alone in our house; know that we’re a soup, a swamp, a net, a helpless and hopeless and basically well-meaning sprawl of people lost and trying.
For these three days I sank, cold and grief and all, into the words and old knowings Kara imparted, while her little black dog ran joyously back and forth and in circles, as we sat on the far slopes of the exquisite Dartington garden, surrounded by the sort of venerable trees you get on these aristocratic estates.
I learned new words which rolled pleasantly round the mouth: heterotrophs; transpiration; burl; fluce; midrib, petiole and pedunculated. We heard about clonal colonies of quaking Aspen; birch cradles; how sapwood hardens into heartwood.
Kara talked about the ripple effect on wood when a chainsaw strikes up on one side, and said we need to be sensitive to the possibility that they can feel pain. She talked about trees’ genders, and said Aspen seems to be non-binary. She told us that Beeches preferentially share nutrients with their young. She mentioned the UK being solid with Hazels after the ice age; she said the Druids used Blackthorn to protect them from the Romans; she told us that in her experience it’s useful to take a small piece of Rowan into a difficult situation. She gave us her recipe for acorn flour pancakes.
At the end of the last day, we were led blindfold to various trees and had to try and sense what species stood in front of us, by their energy alone. I stepped gladly into this mystery: how did I know I was facing an Ash? I just did. But why did I feel tearful, once again, when the blindfold was removed and I saw its outward form with my eyes instead of my mind? One of the veils of separation had been removed, just for that minute; there was connection.
Over the weekend I talked to a woman from Greece who was just finishing an urban agriculture course, about the work she planned to continue back home, and how things were there with the climate; I talked to the woman from Arizona about her Sicilian heritage and how she wanted to go back there and start a smallholding; the Swiss woman and I talked about compassion, and the flamboyant Keralan dude talked to me about medicinal psychedelics and the journey he was on with this, as a young scientist. The buzz of meeting people from so many places made me bright, made me feel a positive song could be sung.
The end bit of the song was the day I got the train back into the real world, after spending a couple of days with a friend nearby. Before I left I walked out of town along the river valley and sat bewildering, my eye-line following the cut where the Dart flows out of Totnes towards Dartmouth. On a bench nearby a young man with long hair sat cross-legged, reading a radical text. Just down the footpath knelt a man with shears, cutting back the grass around a wooden play area, his discarded hi-vis hanging over the railing, and as if life were that simple and rustic, I sat.
In this song, in this version, we were running-on, together: trees, people, the carriages going through the darkness with our lights. The fragrance of the snipped growth wafted uphill to our benches, the bolted docks were a dark rusty red with seed, the rust-brown soil of the hills swooped over the crest across the river like wings, Autumn was making her way up the river and so was whatever it is that happens next.
Notes
You can read Joanna’s introductory post for this essay on our blog, “Radical Noticing” – Adding to the Road Map.
The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller (2015) is published by Penguin Random House.
On Connection by Kae Tempest (2022) is published by Faber.
Joanna’s time at Schumacher College is one of very many stories of immersion, exploration and sharing that students lived at that place of learning during its lifetime as part of the estate of the Dartington Hall Trust. The College was formed in 1991 and sadly closed its doors in August 2024, as reported in a BBC News piece, Anger over sudden closure of college. Sadly, it is not the only such story, with a Guardian report in March 2025 on the Trust’s plan to eject a project that teaches agroforestry using trees and multi-crop planting: Pioneering Devon food forest garden at risk after landowner serves notice.
Schumacher College itself has been succeeded by Schumacher Wild, which continues to offer a range of courses:
“The pioneering vision that has been expressed through Schumacher College’s holistic education since its very first course in 1991 here in South Devon – a five week tour de force on Gaia Theory led by James Lovelock – is now engaged in a deeply transformative journey. We, the recent faculty, staff, volunteers and alumni from Schumacher College, have unexpectedly found ourselves needing to move away from our home of more than thirty years and to set out into the world around us. This uprooting was unplanned and not entered into by choice. It has, therefore, been challenging for all involved to come to the sober recognition that a much-loved chapter of life and learning has now come to an end. When viewed through a holistic, ecological, or spiritual lens, however, life herself teaches us that every ending is in fact a new beginning of some kind – and our story is no different.”
The Soulful Connection with Trees course was led by Kara Moses, a freelance writer, editor, activist and facilitator of rewilding who takes a holistic approach to life and social change.
Joanna Guthrie