It was a few weeks into living in the countryside that I accidentally hugged the tree of death. I’d had a difficult move and was struggling to settle into a new routine and area. To help myself acclimatise, I’d decided to make it a priority to find a regular dog-walking route, something that I could do each day at the same time to give myself a feeling of stability.
It had taken a few days of getting lost down public footpaths but I’d eventually settled on a route that started and ended at my house, taking me across a couple of fields and back past the local church. Rather than walking down the main road that ran alongside it, I had decided to cut through the church yard and so would end this walk reading the inscriptions on tomb stones and wondering about the lives of those who’d lived in my tiny hamlet 200 years ago. Creepy as it may sound, I’ve always rather liked a graveyard. At my first primary school, a regular school trip would be to the church next door to do “grave rubbings” (where you place a piece of paper over a grave stone and then rub a crayon across it to bring out the inscription, of course!). I’ve carried this curiosity about consecrated ground into my adulthood and can happily wile away an hour or so reminiscing about the past lives of people I’ve never met.
The thing that caught my attention in this particular spot, however, was not the tomb stones but a massive tree which stood menacingly in the middle of the graves. At least 15 feet in diameter, on closer inspection the tree was almost hollow in the middle. Weird faces and limbs poked out of the bark, as though the tree had become a holding pen for all who lay beneath it. To look at, it is both monstrous and beautiful, like the best gargoyles.
I’m not a regular tree hugger. Many years ago, when I was still an angry teenager, my mother’s best friend had taken me on a walk through the woods by her house and pointed out a tree she regularly hugged.
“Lean against it and just let it support you,” she urged me.
If it had been anyone else I would have rolled my eyes and walked off, but there was no pushing in her tone, no adult expectation, just a sigh of pleasure as she relaxed against the other side. I leant back and for a minute I swear I felt the tree wrap itself around me, rooting me to the ground and allowing me to just fade into the forest tapestry.
Since that day I’ve probably only hugged a handful of trees and I’ve never again felt that sensation of merging with the earth. But when I walked past that huge tree in the graveyard, I felt myself called to it. I wanted to reach my arms around it as far as I could, and see what would happen if I let it support me.
I walked past that tree every day for a week before I worked up the courage to touch it, to just lay my hand on its gnarly skin. The next day I stroked down the bark, noting the knots and the cracks. And then one day I leaned in and hugged it. I stood there with my arms outstretched, my face pressed to the bark, on my tip toes so that I could get close enough to really lean into it. And as I did, I noticed a little sign to the side of the tree.
“This is one of the oldest yew trees in England.”
I can barely tell an oak tree from a bonsai, so it hadn’t occurred to me until that point to wonder what sort of tree it was. But now that I knew, I wanted to know more. I got home and fired up Google.
“What is the symbolism of the yew tree?”, I asked.
I am not lying to you, nor exaggerating for the sake of the story, when I tell you that Google’s response was:
“The yew tree has long been seen as a symbol of death and doom.”
Death and doom.
I had just hugged the tree of death.
This didn’t feel good. I had just uprooted myself to a new area, was having a panic that I’d made the wrong decision and now the local trees were sending my warning signs when I tried to make friends. A few days later and I came down to the kitchen in the morning to find two toads swimming in my dog’s water bowl. Of course, I googled the significance of toads:
“Death, renewal and transformation.”
It was all feeling very heavy.
A month later and I went to a festival in the grounds of an old country house. While there someone told me about another huge yew tree that was located on the property, “one of the oldest in the country.” I told them my story about the death tree and how I had got a bit shy about hugging trees ever since. They looked at me with horror, it turns out yew trees are poisonous to humans and colloquially known as “the widow’s best friend” because so many women have used them to bump off their husbands.
In that moment I suddenly saw the funny side of it all. The ridiculousness of me hugging a tree in a graveyard because I was feeling lonely in a new place and it offered me a moment of solace. The madness of needing that tree to mean something and the hilariousness of Google putting me firmly back in my place with a prediction of doom and gloom.
When we feel untethered we can look for meaning in all the wrong places. We try to make sense of what is happening to us, to find a clear path in the midst of a mind that feels filled with brambles. In reality, of course, we’re not supposed to feel grounded every minute of every day. There are times when we’re not meant to know what we’re doing or to feel like we’ve made a massive mistake, because it’s in those moments that we open our minds and start to learn.
Some days I’ll still do that dog walk. I’ll retread the ground that feels safe and familiar, that gives me the sense that I know what I’m doing. But in truth, it’s not the walk I enjoy the most. It doesn’t have the amazing views or beautiful silence that I find when I go a bit further afield. It’s good for those days when I’m in a rush or can’t be bothered to stretch myself beyond the obvious but who wants too many of those sorts of days? Not me.
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We live in different places (I’m in the Brecon Beacons) but I also have a regular dog walk through a old churchyard with a yew tree aged at more than 5,500 years old, the oldest in Europe apparently. Never actually hugged it though. And I too love wandering around and sitting in church graveyards because they make me feel so calm and peaceful. Only in daylight though!
Lord Voldemort's wand was made with wood from the Yew tree! Talk about tree of death.