Van tales 2: Deep Adaptation

I’d just bought Misty, my van, and headed to stay with someone I didn’t know in Kent. Some quirky activist with an undercut and a piece of land with sheds on it. Running a place centered around Deep Adaptation – helping people to recalibrate around the climate emergency. He could be total nutcase. He probably was. But it felt right, and anyway, he had a free parking space, so I went.

Piers was actually a real softie. He’d been the sensitive black sheep of his family. The one that didn’t go on to be an investment banker or whatever like his siblings. He was just there, on his own, trying to do his bit for the planet. Activists would come and go, using his place as a ‘regenerative’ base to recoup between actions, or just to visit for the weekend from London, to share ideas, inspire each other and debate tactics. There were a couple of us who stayed longer. I quickly made friends with a very impressive young woman called Storm, who was really bright, brave, and resilient and who was fun to work with as we dug up potatoes, cooked dahl, made our own spoons, and tried to grow stuff.

Every once in a while the police would stop by and we’d have to hide. It was still lockdown and anyway, the neighbouring community hated having a bunch of smelly hippies hanging around. I ended up staying there for three months, got to share some practices, and learned a lot from the people who came and went.

What it was really about, though, was the woods and the mushrooms. Near his property was a large woodland which was privately owned so hardly anyone went there. I’m not sure if we were allowed to go but we did. This was where I started to reconnect with magic. I started getting really into trees, and in particular, I was called to Yew trees. Yew was of course a sacred tree to the druids – known as a bridge to the Underworld and between life and death. Cancer medicine made from the poison taxin is derived from the Yew. This woodland only had one Yew tree in it, so we started calling it ‘One Yew Wood’. I began making regular pilgrimages to this tree, camping underneath it some nights, and building a relationship I can’t quite put into words.

I started taking mushrooms weekly and walking in the woods. Sometimes with others, sometimes alone. The mushrooms opened up a lot for me. Suddenly, I could talk to the trees, plants, rocks, and other aspects of nature and sensed the spirit world living there both on and off the medicine in ways I hadn’t imagined was possible. My heart opened to the moon. I became telepathically linked with the deer. I was blessed by a white snowy owl that came seemingly out of nowhere. And the mushrooms transmitted a sense that this, here, was the alien world; that there were star realms more ‘home’ to many species here than Earth itself, including myself. I was adapting to Underworld which comprised not just deeper aspects of ‘me’ but earth’s spiritual underbelly itself. And I was becoming more ‘of’ that by the day.

One day, a young activist friend and qualified doctor gave me LSD. I’d never tried it before but my experience was profound. After giggling some time with him and our friend, and having some unsettling realisations about mitochondria, I felt I needed to be by myself and wandered over to a quiet spot in the little woods on Piers’s land. There was a tree there that called me. A large, windy old Laurel that Piers hated as it was non-native but that captured my imagination. Well, now on the medicine, I was able to connect with it in the most profound way I’ve ever connected with any being. Time did a strange thing and over those hours I sat with it, I felt like I’d been in a six decade marriage with this being. A long lasting love affair. Its personality and history readable in every branch, every twig, the shape of its trunk. It helped me understand trees in a whole new way. Then the tree became a bridge into something else – I was pure awareness experiencing Itself. Orgasmic. Shiva-shakti.

I felt forever changed by such a deep connection of intimacy. Which is why it was so jarring when the following day Piers announced he was going to cut back the Laurel significantly with his chainsaw as it was ‘a pest’. I feel like I was called by the tree to bear witness to the wisdom and character held in those limbs before they were severed. We have no idea of how our intervention impacts nature on a spiritual level.

Towards the end of my stay, I’d run out of the Cubensis mushrooms I’d been working with and was given some Albinos. ‘They were especially magical’ I was told. I took around the same amount as normal and headed to the woods. Nothing. Hmm. I took some more. Still nothing. A little more. Suddenly I started to feel strange and headed indoors. As the trip started to kick in I could feel I was being pulled down into a dark journey I was in no way ready for. I tried to stay calm. ‘Don’t give me darkness’, I said, ‘give me light’. Next thing incredible light surrounded me on all sides. It was unbearably beautiful. I instinctively started walking around in a circle, and roped in a slightly concerned Piers to do the same. I sensed how my body knew how to do this from ceremonial practices we did a hundred thousand years ago – instinctively protecting the space for the work that was to come.

The light kept getting brighter and brighter and now I was curled up on the floor, unable to bear it. I felt the higher beings with me. They showed me many things, and how Piers’s place was protected and looked like a glorious strategically-held palace on the astral plane, rather than just a shed. I felt various energies being transmitted to me, and, as the high wore off, Piers and our friend came and sat with me, dishing out the evening dahl. It was then that I felt the light of what my rational mind would hesitate to label as ‘God’ within my body and all around me in a way beyond words. But there was no other word for it. It was the pure, divine grace of God, or as much as my system could handle. So intensely beautiful. While he was there, strangely enough, Piers and my friend stopped eating. It was like everything went into suspension. As it faded I asked them if they’d also felt it – they hadn’t. It was like they’d just been frozen in time for a moment. Then we ate.

I could sense my time at the center was nearly up. One afternoon I got a wave from the mushrooms signalling me to grab a pen and write a note: “Natalie will go and visit the lady Eleanor (name changed) where she will learn ‘the ways’. In other lifetimes she will…but in this life, she is to be an usher.”

I knew who they meant. ‘The lady Eleanor’ is a very elusive person and a friend of Bell’s. She is the guardian of land with hand-built cob houses on it in Wales which is deeply sacred. How and who stays there is a matter of pure magick. I was being summoned.