Sleeping With Cedars

The Western Red Cedar is my favorite tree and has been since I moved to the Pacific Northwest. The reasons are numerous. I first took note of them when I got into hiking. They are visually appealing, of course. Scale-like deep green leaves, drooping boughs, ropey, striated cinnamon-colored bark, and a warm, sweet aroma. And I very much like the places that they like to grow - shady, riparian forests and hollows.

Revered by native communities and bestowed with the exceedingly accurate moniker, the Tree of Life. All parts of it have been used for almost every conceivable application and helped sustain every facet of human existence for time immemorial.

I could not have been more happy to see a large, healthy cedar guarding the property and greeting me warmly the first time I visited Whiskey Jane. I’ve mentioned the ancient grove known as Cedar Flats in a previous essay about my favorite places. Naming it as one of the entities that inspired a career change and course correction in my life journey.

Only a handful of months after the loss, I took a writing assignment that allowed me to visit several ridiculously majestic locations within the Kootenay Rockies of British Columbia. One of the outings I participated in was a group hike into alpine territory with a local indigenous guide.

We broke for lunch at a viewpoint that is possibly the grandest I’ve ever witnessed. As we started to eat, he began speaking to the group. Detailing why since the birth of existence, his people have been compelled to commune with outdoor cathedrals like the one I was currently transfixed upon.

There was indescribable beauty unfurling in every direction. However, I was becoming overwhelmed by the moment and the cluttered, competing thoughts clamoring for attention in my head. Then his words began slowly making their way through the fog in my mind until they were front and center and the sole objects of my focus.

His wisdoms and reverence for the natural world resonated so deeply that I needed to step away from the group and compose myself. I stared off to the mountains, wiped the tears from my eyes, and settled into a feeling of profound gratitude for being where I was, and for being anything at all.

After lunch, we took a short hike to a waterfall. As the group was walking back to the trailhead, our guide took me aside and without speaking, brought me down to the edge of the rushing creek and began performing a ceremony. He chanted rhythmically in a low tone, and in what I can best describe as an ancient mountain baptismal, began to cleanse my body and soul with a large cedar bough drenched repeatedly in frigid, pristine glacial melt. After the rebirth, he told me it was time to set down my burden. That it was okay to start walking forward again. She will be walking with me.

A few years before the loss, I was in Olympic National Park working on a story about the historic lodges up there. One afternoon I took a short hike through a magnificent, old-growth forest near Sol Duc Hot Springs. It was early summer and the warm dappled light on the forest floor was offset perfectly by a slight breeze playing hide-and-seek through the rainforest trees. I turned a corner and happened upon a circle of cedars, connected at their wide bases by the most perfect mat of feather moss. Soft and spongey, but not damp - what I have referred to ever since as “nap moss.”

That’s because, on this particular afternoon, the call of that moss bed was too strong to ignore. I laid on my back, looked up into the canopy, and fell into a tranquil sleep. At one point I began to dream lucidly. The moss encompassed and embraced me with knowing warmth and I grew roots that started conversing with those of the ancient trees. Along an undefined timeline that felt like moments but was likely eons, we integrated and I became a new forest form of myself. Not in an unwelcomed act of death or passing, but as a most natural gift in the form of sharing and transference of energies, knowledge, and life. Lying with the moss is now a recurring event whenever I feel invited to do so.

I have become intrinsically bonded with these trees over the last decade and a half. Which I know, doesn’t sound like a very long time. But I get the strong sense that our connection was there well before I arrived here and will be evermore. One of the many things I’ve learned from sleeping with cedars and becoming one with the forest floor.