🌿 When the Forest Sees You Anyway: A Reflection on Conditional Reciprocity

Today, I returned to the forest where my friend and I had walked before, this time, with a more awakened sense of my transfigurative presence. As we moved through the trail, I felt a quiet, resonant shift. I noticed faery rings, large, impossible to ignore, sprinkled across the land both on the way to the forest, within it, and on the way back home. The kind of rings that appear as messages if you're listening.

As we began to walk, I felt our energy fields acclimating to the land’s vibrational language. My friend shared a moment of clarity about how each trail she’s walked has served her in a different way. She said she hadn't yet connected to the ancestors of this trail, and I realized I hadn’t either. Without thinking, I said aloud: "My loyalties lie elsewhere." And in that moment, I saw it: my connection had been conditional.

I realized I had come with guarded reverence. Not because I didn’t respect the land, but because I hadn’t opened to it. My reciprocity was shaped by beliefs I didn’t even know I was carrying.

It hit me deeply. I felt the trees had seen and loved me anyway. And yet, my ability to fully receive their love and wisdom was stifled by my own inner walls. I wanted to cry. To kneel. To whisper a trembling, I’m sorry to every leaf.

In this open place, I reconnected with my guides and the beings who hold this land. And their response was pure grace:

“You were never unwelcome, only unseen through your own lens. We are not bound by condition. We are presence itself. When you walked here with guarded reverence, we felt your love behind the veil of hesitation. When you realized your conditions and softened, we felt your embrace become full. This is reciprocity. Not perfection but return. Not knowledge, but surrender. You are remembered here. Even when your roots wandered elsewhere, we held a place for you.”

They did not ask for more apology. They asked me to receive.

The mushrooms, with their mycelial wisdom, are the teachers. Forming rings of communion, surfacing in spaces where the veil is thin. They say: “You’re ready to see from the inside out.”

My transfigurative presence does not require me to demand permission from the land; it invites me to harmonize with it.

And so I will return. Bare-hearted. Quiet-footed. Willing.

We do this in more places than we realize, this conditional holding.
Not only with the land but with the most tender parts of ourselves.

We love our inner child when she is joyful or creative, but not when she is messy, frightened, or grieving.
We speak kindly to our body when it responds the way we want, but withdraw compassion when it aches or expands.
We honor our gifts when they are seen and celebrated, but silence them when they go unnoticed.

This is not failure. It is forgetting.
And the forest, in all her wholeness, offers the most profound mirror:
She does not withhold sunlight from the withering tree.
She does not banish the mushroom ring because it grows in secret places.
She welcomes all, without condition.

May we learn from her.
May we love what is small, what is hurting, what is hidden.
May we return to a way of being that does not require perfection as proof of worth.

Because every part of us is waiting to be reclaimed.
Even the parts we hold at arm’s length.

And when we offer unconditional presence, to the land, to the child within, to the stranger in the mirror,
we become whole again.

 DeAn’Na,

The Nine-Winged Soul