Nature Speaks Project

INTERVIEW WITH:  Anna Breytenbach

INTERVIEW BY:      Linda Milks

DATE:                  Friday, July 28, 2006

PLACE:                 San Francisco, CA

CONTACT:                 www.animalspirit.co.za

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Jon Young is a nature /wilderness awareness, tracking teacher whom we have both studied with at different times.  He sent an email announcing that Anna would be in the San Francisco bay area teaching a class on animal communication.    I was able to take her class and found the steps she taught us for animal communication were simple, helpful and effective!  We had the chance to practice with photos and get instant verification from the pet owner.  Wow!  I was spot on with a beautiful horse named Henry.

Anna grew up in South Africa. (she has a wonderful accent!) 

She is a trained and skilled animal communicator and the only full time professional one in South Africa.  She gained her certification in this from the Assisi Int’l Animal Institute, in Oakland, CA. 

Anna is called on by many, worldwide, with a variety of issues for animals both large and small.   A skillful storyteller, Anna has many rich and unique experiences to draw from; some of which are recorded here.

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Linda:

Because you’re primarily an animal communicator, should we be making a distinction in the way you communicate with trees and plants?

Anna: 

Well, it’s interspecies communication. So for purposes of what people can hear or the labels that people need, animal communicator is an accepted term, but it’s really interspecies communication.

Linda:  

I took a workshop from you a couple of weeks ago on animal communication and so that was my focus and I felt I needed to delineate between communicating with animals and specifically communicating with trees and plants.   (Great Workshop!)

Anna:

Right, the techniques are exactly the same. So those connection techniques are by no means exclusive of other methods but are exactly the same just based on relaxing and focusing your intent and connecting with the “other”, whether the “other” is in the plant, mineral or animal kingdom.  The techniques are the same and most peoples interest in the application of those skills however does tend to be in the animal realm. So that’s where the term animal communicator comes from.  It’s kind of at the application layer but behind it is really interspecies communication, or inter-being communication, in a language beyond words.

Linda:

Right, right.

Anna: 

Yeah, kind of like soul to soul communication or mind to mind communication. This obviously implies a starting point that these other beings, other life forces we are communicating with, have a consciousness and are sentient beings with thoughts, feelings, emotions and expressions that they can convey.  So the outward ? facing stuff may be called animal communication because that’s the application aspect of it, but its really interspecies communication.

Linda:  

How did you get into this?  How old were you when you first recognized this ability…?

Anna: 

Well I guess when I first recognized this consciously was as a young adult, but then was I was reminded of some childhood experiences.  I do believe that all children really are in this way of being and communicating particularly before they have human language.  Their parents get all excited when their child utters its fist word around the age of 2.  But there’s a whole lot of intentional? (intuitive?) activity and interaction going on between children and other beings in their space before they have human language.  And so children are particularly good and spontaneous and intuitive at this and they therefore have fantastic relationships with animals, be they domestic pets or wild animals or trees and plants and other unseen spirits or beings.

As a child, it was my firm conviction, until I was told otherwise by adults, that when the wind was blowing and the trees would move and the leaves would move, that the trees were waving to me. And I would always wave back. So when we would be driving down the road or out walking somewhere I’d be waving and waving, just waving back at the trees for surely they were waving a greeting; and in that beautiful spirit of greeting was just mutual acknowledgement it felt like.  I had a sense of the trees being animated and me responding in a shared space of acknowledgement. And a real greeting, just a mutual greeting without their being a need for an exchange of any other information in particular. 

And the older I grew the more that became relegated to the world of fantasy or make-believe because I was being told, as all children are, that reality is something quite different and only to be relied upon in the 5 sensory way.  So little things like that. 

My dreamtimes were filled with lions in particular.  The same big male African lion would show up in dreams, always approaching me. A real sense of the lion approaching me, making himself visible, making himself known to either leading me on an adventure or to protect me from whatever my fears du jour might have been. 

And interestingly enough as much as my mother doesn’t believe in this stuff at all, she still will openly admit to not being able to explain how always when I was sleeping as a baby there was what she describes as the smell of the lions cage at the zoo around me. There was this overpowering big cat smell only when I was sleeping, whether it was daytime or nighttime. 

It drove her crazy, she got the fumigators in to fumigate the whole house, she ripped up the carpets in my bedroom, she moved my nursery to another bedroom, but the smell would follow.  Even if they were asked to a dinner party and I was just sleeping in the friend’s bedroom while we were there temporarily, or if I had a daytime nap when I was sleeping, there was this strong smell of lion around. 

Linda:

Really!

Anna:

Yeah.  So she still can’t really account for that.  So I guess I’m reminded of these things that were there kind of in the background.  We grew up in a typical suburban house, didn’t have time out in nature or anything so I didn’t really have the opportunity for this to become a strong part of my reality.

Linda: 

Where did you grow up?

Anna: 

In Capetown, South Africa. 

As a young adult I was volunteering in wildlife rescue places, rehabilitation centers or animal shelters or with conservation programs and spending hands-on time with animals, who needed healing usually.  Whether they were birds or squirrels or cheetahs - I worked for about 8 years as a cheetah handler.  I was trained to handle cheetahs in education and conservation settings with captive cheetahs as well.  But that’s still a lot of hands-on work with animals that are intrinsically wild in nature and still carry that coding.

And when I began doing that work? in the captive sense and doing some tracking training and being outdoors, not just in a hiking sense but in sort of a nature appreciation sense, the more I was doing that I began to have some spontaneous experiences that I couldn’t account for logically; particularly when I moved to the US in 1998.

I didn’t have a mental database for North American animals, I didn’t come with that software!   I got the software for African animals.:)  So when I was out tracking I had no information to go on and my analytical skills completely failed me because I had no data stored to analyze or search through the kind of identification methods or logical methods for determining what animal had passed here or what those tracks might mean.

So all I had to go on was intuition.  And I would begin to get spontaneous mental images of the animal that I would describe to the tracking instructor which would turn out to be mink even though I had no idea of what a mink should look like. And then the tracks would play out to prove that that was true. 

So these are just some examples of how I would get intuitive senses of the animals form and shape or mood or abilities or physical appearance even though I had no label for it in my mind. And when I would get spontaneous experiences or an intuition that there would be a bird around the trail with an injured left wing and we would round the corner of the trail and indeed there was just that.   So there was a whole contortion of the time/space continuum as well.  Yeah, spontaneous experiences like that I think were probably born of my growing empathy through working hands-on with the animals; based on why my being energetically tapped in.

Linda: 

When you were tracking the animals and just being in nature, did it also expand to the surrounding trees?   Was it a forest / woods atmosphere?  Were you also getting the same sensing from say the trees or was it only animals?

Anna: 

Right, maybe animals at first.  I wasn’t getting spontaneous information coming towards me from the plants at all.  But in one of the advanced training courses I did in this field with the Assisi Int’l Animal Institute, (in Oakland, CA) the course was on communicating with the wild ones.  It was a three day course, the last day of which was dedicated to communicating with plants.   And there opened up a whole new world to me communicating with sunflowers and trees.  And then I recalled also an incident that happened the year before down in Big Basin Redwood State Park. 

Linda: 

And when was this?

Anna: 

This was in 1998.  I had just moved to this country, moved here to be with a man I had met and fallen in love with and had a long distance relationship with.  When I got here I discovered to my horror that all was not as it had seemed when we were on vacation together. And within a few weeks I was strongly getting the message that I should be out of this relationship.  I was all in two minds about it because I had come this far, and I had used my life savings to get here and all of those sorts of things.

Linda:  And you were living here in the San Francisco bay area?

Anna:

Yes, I was living in Los Gatos, which was interesting in itself, because I’ve always been strongly influenced, imprinted with cats; I grew up with big cats.  And I had no idea what Los Gatos meant but he was living there when I came here and I was soon to discover that it meant the cats, hmmm, OK!

We were out hiking one Saturday afternoon amongst the redwoods and I was really in dire straights. Kind of facing the crossroads, really feeling I should leave the relationship but not knowing how to. My visa to be in the country was dependent upon the relationship, and all of those technicalities.  

I sat down in despair leaning against a tree while we were taking a break in the hike and he was also leaning against a tree, catching his breath, at the edge of a sort of gorge going down into the river. 

And I just asked no one in particular, in my mind, what shall I do, what shall I do about this relationship?  And the tree he was leaning against, moved away from him so a gap opened up between his hand and the tree.  And the tree leaned out into the gorge, leaned downhill away from him so he appeared to be leaning on thin air.  His body didn’t change, he didn’t move  with it, just the tree moved away from him.

At first I felt I was having a dizzy experience, you know that I was hyperventilating or something, deprived of oxygen after a stiff hike and I thought I might be becoming faint. But in that moment I noticed that nothing else in the landscape moved, it wasn’t as if the world was spinning, only the tree moved, everything else was static.  And so in my amazement, I blurted out to him “did you just see that?”  And he said no, see what?  I just described what I had seen and he said “Oh, you’re just crazy”, and he walked on.

And it was amazing.  This was to me, a very clear message from the tree. I just asked, what should I do, and the tree showed me, move away from him, get away, move away.  It was very clear and I did leave the relationship a week later. 

And it was a real, caring message from that particular tree.

Linda:

There was an emotion that came along with it?  And you knew this event was a specifically for you?

Anna:

An emotion that came with it, yes.  It felt personalized, it felt almost grandfatherly. It felt like a caring elder, like a personal family member elder who was really advising me as if I was sitting at the feet of a grandparent asking what I should do about some dilemma in my life. It wasn’t huge and sort of loud it was just very strong and clear and subtle.

Linda:

What kind of a tree was this?

Anna:

It was a redwood.  And probably at least 250 years old judging by its diameter. 

And back then I knew about power animals, totem animals.  I didn’t know about power totem plants until two years later I was on this advanced course.  And in a guided shamanic journey to find out about totem plants, the redwood came through for me.  That was verified by my mentor so, yeah, I found that quite interesting.

So that was really intriguing.  And then in this course where we were in our officially connecting with the plants I found a whole different quality of communication opening up compared to what I had been used to with the animals and, hard to describe really, but the communications with the plants just have seemed so much more grounded, which may seem really obvious and perhaps a bit trite you know, but really just a lot more grounded.

Linda:

More than the animals, you’re talking about?

Anna:

Yeah, yeah.  A lot more grounded, a lot more simple perhaps, and beautiful in that simplicity.  And with shorter communications.

Linda:

When you say simpler, do you mean also less complex, as if it were from a less complex or sophisticated being?

Anna:

No, not at all.

Linda:

But just as a form and style of communication?

Anna:

Exactly, very good question, very good delineation and indeed the latter. Only as a form and style of communication was it simpler.

Anna: 

No, in fact in the simplicity of it in the succinct clarity of the shorter communications with the plants often comes, it seems, a deeper, wiser, truth.  Almost the universal law of, the universal truth just being, indeed, simple and pure.  You’re not needing a whole lot of circumferential discussion chatter, detail or embellishment. 

And so those great simple truths and wisdoms can be so simply and beautifully stated without it being you know long poetic discourses; so in its simplicity often just a lot of beautiful things. 

For example, the sunflower I communicated with in that workshop.  I remember I asked how the sunflower felt about having bees buzzing around it all day?  And interesting here too is the automatic human conditioning that we come with so, my barely conscious pre-conception was that it might be rather irritating to be surrounded by bees the whole day, you know kind of not be able to move away.  And I didn’t want to project that onto the sunflower but that was, you know, had I had a list of possible answers that would have been probably top of the list.  And instead sunflowers energetic response was “I love being kissed by the bee’s awareness.” Being kissed by the bee’s awareness. You know the bees land and did their thing and sunflower felt kissed and felt appreciated.  And that was just beautiful and something that my mind wouldn’t have anticipated.  Yeah, so beautiful, beautiful insights into the harmony and interrelating of various beings in nature in the grand cycle of symbiosis and helping to nurture each others ends and goals and reproductive cycles and just the communal experience of life.

Linda:

And did this communication come to you as a thought, in words?

Anna:

It did. In my case it did. And that’s more a reflection of my communication style or my learning preferences or my learning mode as a psychology theory would have it. So what’s really happening is that I am perceiving, my energetic being is perceiving the pure energy of what has been conveyed and then my human brain is interpreting it into words so that I can describe it to myself even.  If I were a more visually orientated person I may get mental images, if I were a more kinesthetic person I may get tactile sensations, but as it happens I’m quite a thought based conceptual person and so I tend to get words.  And that doesn’t mean that the plants or the animals have a vocabulary.  That’s just the vehicle for the imaging that I’m perceiving.

And so it’s been a very interesting journey for me.  And funny enough I can only see or visually perceive auras around trees and plants and I never have around people or other animals, despite the majority of my work being with the animal nations.  Very interesting, I can only see the aura around trees…

Linda: 

And when you see the aura’s can you read information from them?  Are there colors or other distinctions within the energetic field?

Anna:

No, it’s an energetic shimmering that goes with it and in varying expanse, distance wise from the trees and I don’t see different colors.

Linda:

And do you find that signifies something, as far as the different width or breadth of the aura around the tree or plant is concerned?

Anna: 

The only relative thing I’ve noticed before is the health of the individual. A really healthy tree has a brilliant aura. But otherwise no, I haven’t looked into it any further.  There may be ways to distinguish more that I don’t know about but for me it hasn’t meant anything more than that.  Relatively speaking, but in general it just seems like an awareness of the trees expanded presence.  And I’m sure that what I can visually see is even then only a portion of what are the trees real presence and the real embrace. 

Linda: 

Do you have a favorite tree or plant that you can communicate with more easily than others?

Anna:  

Yeah, it does remain the redwood tree. Really strong.

Linda:

Which is only found in the western US. 

(Transcription note: there is a small remote area in China that also has a form of redwood tree)

Anna:

Yes, indeed.

Linda:

Interesting.  So do you think if you would not have come here to where the redwood trees are you would have entered into tree / plant communication in another form or do you think the portal for that…

Anna: 

Yes, I think the portal has been the redwood trees and coming here. They really drew me in energetically.  And so before I even knew about communicating in this way I would find myself wanting to go, solo, into the redwood areas and just sit quietly. Yeah, they were a real touchstone for me.  So they really drew me into the embrace, I feel, and perhaps prepared me. 

I may have come about it in another way but back in South Africa we don’t have tree beings of such stature or height you know not from any species as you do here in N. America.  And even as a child, the fig tree out in the back yard I used to love playing in and sitting in but then I was more about doing, a lot of doing.  But being with trees definitely came from the redwoods.

Linda: 

Do you have any other stories or messages you’ve gotten over the years from the redwoods that you’d like to share?

Anna:

Actually, not anything in particular.  It feels like a kinship.  And it feels like there’s an ongoing relationship rather than anything in particular flowing through.  So that’s it, I’ve been so busy with the animal side that I haven’t sat down to work specifically with the redwoods.  So it feels like there’s a kinship there and a communication channel that’s open should there be something to be relayed but nothing in particular has come through from them.

I had another spontaneous experience although with trees back in South Africa where a place where I was living on a mountainside was having the last portion of the forest cut down by the farmer who decided to clear the mountainside and make room for more vineyards on his emerging wine farm.   And so I knew it was going to be a two month lumber jack job and the day before they were due to start I went out to the edge of the forest and did a bit of reiki healing for the area in general and also connected with the Deva of the forest and the Deva of the trees to ask that they help prepare the various life forms in the forest, help prepare the trees, for withdrawing their life-force energy and for transmuting their life-force energy into other ways because their existing bodies were going to be taken down starting the very next day.

And I did all of that and about a week after the massacre had started I went walking amongst the now clear-cut portion as well noticing before I reached it even that there was this absolute hole in the landscape energetically and from a sound point of view.  And I was almost tracking by sound before I even reached the area visually and feeling this energetic gap in the landscape and I knew that right around the corner there was this black hole with an absolute, absolute absence of life.  And that indeed was the case.

Interestingly enough my cat, who doesn’t walk much at all because of various physical restrictions, he chose to come with me that day and it was a full kilometer round- trip. And he came with me the whole day and as I walked past each tree stump I gave it a little bit of reiki, just laid on my hands and did a bit of healing, he too would shadow me and jump up onto each tree stump, walk across it with his paws and jump down again. Very intentional he seemed, you know, that day.

Anyway, I moved away from that area about a month after this tree felling happened.  Three months later I was going for a healing treatment modality called synchronization harmonics - it’s kind of a mixture of various energy healing techniques and muscle testing, using a pendulum, working with higher consciousness.  And the healing practitioner had me just lie down, close my eyes, told me not to talk even though I would be fully awake during the whole process and she would just be relating what was going on and giving me feedback. 

So she goes about this sort of psycho-spiritual healing figuring out, with assistance from her guides and from my guides, which areas of the body and the energetic body need healing and why. And at some point I heard her exclaim “Oh, there’s another consciousness here,” as I felt a presence at my left shoulder that definitely wasn’t her, she was at my right foot.  And she used a pendulum. She was expecting it to be animal of some sort because of my work too, I suppose, but to her surprise it wasn’t.  She said “oh this is elemental, oh this is wood, and wood has a message for you and wood says “thank you for the healing””.

And even then intellectually I didn’t quite process what she was saying.  I thought oh, that’s strange, I wonder what that’s about.  And after the session in the debriefing she asked me if I had had any instances with wood, and I sort of said no, she said  “how about with trees?” and then suddenly the light went on and I go “ Oh yes, these trees back home, three months ago’!

And she wondered what I had done. 

Of course I had gone to her not mentioning trees at all, I was there for some physical ailments I was having at the time. And so that was a very beautiful spontaneous kind of reciprocation from the trees to say thank you for the healing and they had shown up at the earliest opportunity, I guess, when they had a channel through which to reach me. 

Linda:

What kind of trees were they, do you know?

Anna:

They were stone pines and blue gums. 

Linda:

Have you been back to that area since then?

Anna:

Not directly to the area. Back to the neighbor’s cottage - I’ve been close.  But not right back to the area yet.

Linda:

You’ve just been up in the Lake Tahoe area and you were mentioning a lot of lumber activity, would you mind commenting on that?

Anna:

 Mmmm.  A huge amount, to my shock and horror. 

Firstly, as a more sort of political statement I guess; I’m shocked. 

I’m shocked that the term National Forests can even be used!  From the term National Forest one thinks of a national treasure and something to be protected, a birthright. But that’s a mask for land of many uses that’s managed by the Dept. of Agriculture and that term speaks to harvesting and to manage for human needs way of thinking. 

So I guess in my naiveté, as an alien myself, I naively thought that National Forest was this national treasure and a place to go and experience and observe and absorb.  I had no idea I would be subjected to the constant sound of chainsaws and being woken up, pre-dawn, by lumber trucks thundering past this well established camp ground on the edge of beautiful Lindsay Lake up in the Lake Tahoe National Forest area. 

I saw these trucks going to and fro each day, three of them working the route bringing down freshly cut timber that was still moist and wet with life oozing and it was too much for me. 

In all my animal work I’ve become very accustomed to dealing with hard situations. Grief filled situations, animals going to be euthanized the next day, tragic awful situations that I’ve become very easily able to just deal with and allow it pass through me.  But in this case it was just such a shock. 

I was out in nature, I guess hadn’t had any preparation for this energetically and I was quite overcome with grief that first morning.  Literally just moved to tears because seeing these trees going by, recently felled the day before, and these trees were in confusion. They were really in confusion. I had a spontaneous communication with them as they were driving by on the truck.

Now usually if I’m out driving around and I see a lumber truck go by or I’ll go past a timber yard, I just offer thanks and send a message of gratitude to each of the trees for their life that they’ve offered up and pray that they are appreciated in whatever final form they are going to take at whatever their final destination may be.  Whether it be a home or a piece of furniture, to whatever human use they are obviously intended for. 

This time before I could even get to that state, I was just receiving information from these trees.  And they were confused, they were really confused. They had been living a perfectly natural life, deeply rooted into an alpine meadow, growing amongst their own families and having their own children grow up beneath them and suddenly they were being ripped  from this.  Perhaps they had not seen any humans before that day or if they had seen humans they were used to humans who came there to see them and to appreciate them.  And they were suddenly ripped and plucked from this life.  And the confusion, the absolute confusion and distress was just overwhelming emanating from those trucks. 

And as I was communicating with them, what that means by communicating is that I’m empathetically experiencing what they’re experiencing. And the fact that I was overwhelmed is probably just testimony to the fact that they were indeed overwhelmed by their experience and that had me really just weeping. As they were indeed weeping, they were still seeping their life juices from their trunks.  They were weeping, I was weeping - and only after allowing that to pass through me was I able to again, as distinctly myself rather than empathetically experiencing them, I was distinctly as myself able to send them healing and thanks and indeed some information about why this was happening and what had happened, all the while just feeling ashamed of being a member of the human race, really. 

You know when one is communicating with a wild being and having to explain why things are being done, you realize the complete inadequacy and just thoughtlessness and wrongdoing of the human species at large. And I often find myself, as I did in this case, apologizing for the human species and having to having to explain that the majority of us are just largely unconscious.

Now back in sort of the intellectual realm I don’t consider myself to be an activist, I don’t consider myself to be an idealist and I tend to be somewhat of a pragmatist.  And so I’m not saying personally for me that never should a tree anywhere in the world be felled. 

What I do say however is that the way that humans used to live, which is in harmony and in balance with nature and that if a tree were taken, it was done with very careful selection of the tree.  Done with communication and in communion with tree and determining which tree was ready to offer itself and with a very deep honoring and thanksgiving and ceremony. And then a very deeply honoring use of that tree as well in its many purposes that came forth without any waste and with a deep ongoing appreciation for the tree’s life form that has now been modified to take on different form and shape.  And to continue to be honored through being fashioned and used in a way that is, again, giving and continuing of life.

And so it’s the thoughtlessness behind the way in which logging happens and trees are harvested - it’s the thoughtlessness both on the macro scale, on the large scale economically speaking, and on a sort of individual level.  And when we go in with technology and chain saws and the thoughtlessness in the action and the pain inflicted in the ways in which it’s done… as well as the bigger reasons.  You know there’s no need for it to happen on the scale that it is happening at all.

Linda:

Over what period of time did this take place?  And do you think that the trees were experiencing their emotions and you just happened to tap into their wavelength, almost as if you were overhearing a conversation?  Or do you think they spoke to you specifically in a back and forth manner?

Anna:

Yes, something like that. The trees had been felled, they were in confusion and distress and some portal opened to allow me to witness that and I think if there was a clear communication I initiated that by offering them information.  Until that point I was just really feeling what they were feeling.  So these were the trees that had already been felled. 

But then we moved to upper Lindsay Lake in an effort to get away from all these logging trucks.  And the trees there were in an established forest that had not been earmarked, that had not got the little tags and marks on them, not been earmarked for felling.  And there it was more of a communication, intentional communication from tree to human between me and them.  I was reassuring them that they would not be affected, and what they communicated to me was that they were feeling the distress of their cousins up the slopes. They were feeling the distress, really feeling the distress. And they were maybe a quarter mile from the road where their recently felled cousins were being transported to and fro.

Also though from that upper Lindsay Lake, one could constantly hear the chainsaw activity going on and up at Culbertson Lake?. And to my ears, beyond the chainsaws, I could hear the screaming of the trees, too. 

It’s a higher pitch.  It strikes only partially as an aural sense and the rest is some sort of energetic sense like a constant high pitch screaming that does not change in cadence.  It’s not like yells, it’s not staccato, they are not individual shouts or yells, it’s a constant wailing; almost a communal wailing by not only those being taken down but by those standing around them as well.

And so when I read of people hearing trees scream, I can really believe that because I have experienced this just a few days ago.

We stayed in the area a whole day, deliberately, and did some prayer and ceremony for the trees.  But also after that day we just had to leave, it was too much to be around on an ongoing basis.

Linda:

I’m wondering about the reaction of the trees that had been felled. When you explained to them why they were cut down and being taken away, did this have a calming effect or modulate their experience or allow for better understanding on their part?

Anna:

It did modulate it. It lessened the amplitude of their expression of grief and confusion, but it wasn’t necessarily understood. It was a sense of release perhaps, but in a giving up kind of a sense, almost despair.  So their confusion was alleviated. There was perhaps an intellectual understanding, if one can ascribe such a quality and way of knowing to a tree. So there was an acknowledgement of what was happening and an explanation for it but it was not understood.  And then just a muteness.  So they became more still but I would not say more accepting. Not still as a sense of having reached a still point but as a, gosh, we get it, and Oh…So it’s as if they knew what was going to happen to them now.  But they were not at peace with it.

Linda:

Is that how that episode ended?

Anna:

Yeah.

Linda:

Do you have any thoughts on how they will resolve their situation as time goes by?  Do you have any way to gauge that based on your experience?

Anna: 

Well, all I can think of is when I do drive by timber yards, or grave yards as I call them, I call them graveyards not just for the obviously definable reasons, but also from the energy that comes from those planks of wood or those lines and lines of trunks awaiting processing. The feeling that comes from them is that the life force has largely been given up. It’s been given up.

I don’t know where it’s gone. I know that in the indigenous people’s understanding, both in real life and what show’s up in mythology and folklore and storytelling, is that wood and trees harbor and hold the sun, holds the suns energy.  And that then being burned for fuel is releasing that beautiful sun. It’s as though they store the sun, store the fire for us - that they gladly release. And so the whole cycle of giving and receiving is continued. And I think that’s kind of a healthy and beautiful release.

When I drive past those timber yards or grave yards I don’t get that feeling of life force being stored and waiting to be released, it feels to me that it has already gone. I don’t know where.

Linda:

Did the trees in the upper Lindsay Lake area, who were not to be cut, have a broader understanding of what was happening and was there something that you felt they were able to give energetically to their relations?

Anna:

 I don’t know if there was a broader understanding of what was happening but when we reassured them that they would be OK themselves, they didn’t care too much about that.  They were not selfish in any way. So they didn’t go, sort of whew and thank goodness…

Linda:

It wasn’t an individual response it was a species response?

Anna:

It’s a species issue, exactly. So reassuring them as individuals didn’t really blip on their radar screen, it didn’t change them energetically. It didn’t make them less involved with what was happening to those around them. 

It felt like they were receiving what was going on around them that they were receiving and absorbing some of the shock waves and taking some of that on to help alleviate the pain and suffering. And so they were actually absorbing a lot of it.

They were not, on an individual basis, confused or sort of escalating or anxious.  They were absorbing it and drawing it down, drawing it down deep into the earth.  Processing it, taking that shock and absorbing it.  They were really not caring at all about the individual reassurances, or longevity questions - not one of those trees actually cared about their own survival. 

Linda:  

When you say that these other trees were absorbing some of the impact of that, do you think that some of the nature spirits living in the felled trees were then transferred to some of the trees that were still rooted and living? Do you think that might be part of what they were absorbing?

Anna:

It felt like they were absorbing real energy coming from the individual trees that were being felled. So that’s quite possible because life force does get transmuted in some way.

Linda:

I’m trying to figure out the science of it, so to speak, the metaphysical science of it.

Anna: 

Yeah.  It felt like it was shock waves. Concentric rings - the ripple effect when something gets dropped in a pond. I felt that this was the way the shock waves were being absorbed, but not just that. It did feel like there was a very real absorption of “beingness.”  Beyond just the hit upon hit of shock wave, which is more of an effect of something happening, there was an absorbing of “beingness” as well.

Linda:

Almost like taking people into your own home to give them shelter when they have lost their own?

Anna:

Yes, there was a very nurturing feel to it as well. And that would imply that there would have to be something to nurture.  There was a very nurturing feel.  It wasn’t a reaching up, these trees were still standing, they weren’t reaching out as if they were going, they were very firm in themselves and absorbing and receptive.  Yes, I think that’s very possible.

(We pause to take it all in…I ask how she’s doing since she has been talking for quite a while.  She kindly agrees to a bit more questioning for added context. - LM)

Linda:

Do you ever get messages through dreams?

Anna:

If I dream about a species there tends to be a clear message, like if I dream about whales or the elephants….

I only ever once dreamt about a tree.  I was out hiking and I was somewhere high up and I walked past the last lemon tree in the world.  And I knew it was the very last lemon tree, it was quite a stark image. 

Linda:

I was also wondering about having grown up in SA, your exposure to different myths and indigenous cultures…

Anna:

You know I grew up in apartheid. We were deliberately misinformed and disenfranchised and all of that was kept out of the history books in school. It was kept away from us, black people were kept away from us. They were not allowed in the cities without a pass, it was just awful. We weren’t allowed to be seen fraternizing, it was just such a horrible robbing of our ancestral knowledge.  We were not allowed to see any of those things.

Linda:

And since then…

Anna:

Since then I have a very close black girlfriend who comes from the rural areas and she may well have some really nice stuff.  She’s already told me, I was just commenting on a dove outside (makes sound of dove) and she said “oh, that dove calling is a wake-up call to the consciousness of humans. And the call means: ‘wake up, why do you sleep, wake up, why do you sleep’ - in her language. So I’ll ask about the trees   - she’s a primary school teacher so she’s kind of in the storytelling way.  I’ll ask her and whatever she tells me I’ll relay to you for sure.  And that would come from the indigenous African.

Linda:

Oh, thanks Anna, wonderful!

End Tape.