Listening to the Forest: What the Lichen Told Me

Tree doctor. Green Man's Beard. These are the names Usnea whispers to me when I find him in the forest.

The lichen helps to filter the air for the trees where he grows and produces broad antibacterial and selective antifungal compounds to protect the trees from infection.

While he grows in many places, energetically Usnea is a medicine of the north, a bear medicine, with a strong affinity for the lungs and an ability to restore a healthy balance of bacteria in the body's mucous membranes by culling overgrowths of Gram positive bacteria and gently supporting the immune system.

Matthew Wood writes that in many North American indigenous traditions, "To dream of the bear brings empowerment in healing and work with plants."

So it makes perfect sense that this bear medicine was the forest medicine that initiated me into my work as an herbalist. (Never mind that Usnea isn't really a plant.)

He first spoke to me in the late spring and early summer of 2007, when I was wandering the Bangor City Forest, my heart breaking as I felt someone who had seen and touched and transformed me deeply slipping out of my life. (I had yet to learn that nobody who touches and is touched that deeply really ever disappears from your life forever.) Usnea reached his green threads into the cracks in my heart and began working to awaken my primal memory of my connection to all things, and my power as a healer.

I returned to that same forest this week, to listen deeply to Usnea again.

He spoke with grief and concern for the health of the forest.

Bangor City Forest is on the southern edge of the great boreal forests. The trees Usnea has been doctoring are feeling the effects of climate change. Within a generation or two, the forest here may transition completely to the kind of eastern temperate forest found in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The retreat of the boreal forest marks the retreat of the north -- the place of darkness, of deep winter dreams, of ancestral memory. Something fundamental is lost when we lose touch with such a huge part of the original darkness and wildness from which we emerged.

Two centuries ago these woods were full of caribou and timber wolves. Polar bears would sometimes range south searching for food.

With settlement, we lost that degree of wildness. And now climate change threatens to take the boreal forest itself from large parts of Maine.

Usnea is calling on us to reawaken that wild darkness within us that can help us dream our way back into connection with the living Earth and let her work through us to help us remember ways of living that will let the forest breathe, grow, and thrive.

The Wound is Where the Healing Comes

By the third day of my vision quest, fasting alone in the forest just above a stream flowing into the Pemigiwasset River, it was all I could do to to stumble to the edge of the ten foot stone circle that marked the boundary of my world.

Just beyond that border, I saw a fallen hemlock branch covered in lichen -- and among the lichens, a patch of usnea that seemed to glow with a pale light. Usnea is a lichen made up of long, grey-green threads commonly called "old man's beard." To protect the trees that it grows on from infection, usnea produces antibacterial and anti-fungal compounds that also serve as very powerful medicine for humans and other animals.

From somewhere inside my chest, I heard the voice of the lichen speaking, telling me that the lichen would often grow in the places where the tree was wounded, that the wounds themselves called forth the medicine. A song began to rise inside me:

"The wound is where the healing comes,
The wound is where the change begins!

Break on open and feel again,
Break on open and dream again,
Break on open and grow again,
Break on open and live again!"

As I sang out loud, cycling through the chant again and again, questions and contradictions I had been struggling with began to resolve themselves.

Central was the conflict I felt between the political work I have dedicated my adult life to up to now and the healing work that I have been powerfully drawn to in recent years. More and more it has been working to bring people together with plants that can support the healing of their bodies, minds, and spirits that has made me feel most alive. But strong voices inside me had been insisting that I had a responsibility to be part of political and cultural transformation.

That dichotomy fell away. I thought of the people who have come into my life and the pain they are living with -- veterans, torture survivors, military families, survivors of sexual assault. And I came to understand how opening to the reality of the trauma they have suffered reveals much about the fundamental disease at the heart of our culture that gave rise to the violence that brought such devastation into their lives. And if as Wise Women teach, "the problem is the ally to the whole," and if usnea as usnea was telling me, "the wound is where the change begins," then by coming to know the nature of those wounds I would also come to know the wild, living medicines that would help bring wounded bodies, minds, and spirits back to health. And that healing would point the way to bringing a sick culture into the dynamic balance of justice and sustainability.

In the myth of the Fisher King, the king sits on a throne by the water's edge, blood pouring from a gaping wound in his thigh. And because the king is wounded the land has become barren. The wound never heals because everyone is afraid to ask the one question that would stop the bleeding and restore the king and the land to health -- "What is the source of the wound?" The answer to the question lies beneath the waters the king is afraid to dive into.

The reverse of the Fisher King is the Tarot's King of Cups. The King of Cups is the King who has dived into the waters of the unconscious, come to terms with the darkness, and emerged transformed -- he sits on his throne holding a cup that overflows with healing water. As the bearer of the chalice he is a servant of the Great Goddess, the cup a symbol of her womb and the sacred blood of its mysteries.

The role of one who would walk a shamanic path in this lifetime, who would step up to accept the responsibility of holding that chalice of healing water is to come face to face with the reality of the devastation our culture has inflicted on people it now chooses to render invisible, an in bringing the wounded into contact with the healing powers of the wild, living Earth discover the medicine that can transform us all.