I was finding it difficult to settle on one visualisation consistently though, so I used a technique from Kathleen Adams' Journal to the Self (an inspirational book that still provides loads of practical support, even if it's too old to cover the opportunities available from online tools). She describes a way of throwing down ideas onto a list, aiming for 100 items within 20 or 30 minutes, without worrying too much about repetitions or off-topic ideas. I used this to explore all the ideas about my meditative grove, and it was very productive. I spotted a number of recurring themes that I might not have expected, including lots about about death and memorials - including yews in a graveyard and a spinney of trees growing over an ancient long barrow tomb, as well as ideas about circles of dead or fossilised trees.
I also realised that many of the powerful visual images I use come from fiction - from C S Lewis' Narnia to George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire (with the weirwood trees of the old gods specifically). In these stories, lost paths in the woods can be a gateway to another world - as also in the Silfen paths of Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga, and Ursula Le Guin's Threshold (also known as The Beginning Place). There are much older versions of this idea, or course, in the folktales about crossing over into Faerie or the Celtic Otherworld, or possibly the Norse Yggdrasil. I feel there's no problem with recycling these fantasy themes in a personal visualisation - how else are we to put structure on those archetypes except through stories? John Matthews, one of the creators of the Wildwood Tarot, talks about recurring themes from folklore, Arthurian myths and Robin Hood too in his book The Quest for the Green Man.
But one image surprised me when I wrote it late on in my list - I simply put down "ghost trees". I'm not sure if I meant something specific by this - I wouldn't give much credence to trees having an immortal conscious spirit that lives on after their death to haunt the living. However, ghosts can be seen as projections from our real living minds, giving form to an external non-physical agency that holds a memory associated to a specific locale. In that sense, we can imagine the presence of trees that once grew at whatever location we are now in. Where I live, on the edge of a city with a mild wet climate, it's not that hard to imagine trees growing not that long ago precisely where our flats were built.
Imagining each second or heartbeat as a year, and visualising time flowing backwards, it would take less than a minute to get back to a time when the building wasn't standing. In an hour we'd be back to the Bronze Age, when the deforestation and transition to settled farming in Britain was still going on. In the intervening centuries, a dozen huge trees might have come and gone on this spot. There's nothing to stop the imagination going much further back, to a time before humans left Africa or into deep geological time, when the only trees might have been ferns or ginkgos, all growing on this patch of the Earth's crust. Alternatively, the ghost trees could represent the potential for what might grow here in the future, whether that's familiar species when this site could become a garden or parkland, or something from a remote future, long after the anthropocene. By then perhaps hardy weeds like the daisy or pioneer species like the buddleja will have evolved into giants to fill the niches left by the extinction of the elm, ash and horse chestnut.
These ghost trees needn't be sinister malign presences that cause fear of poltergeist activity. We may have guilty consciences from exploiting them by felling, burning, pulping and so on. But, to quote Robert Frost, "life goes on". Where I sit now, on the second floor, I might be in the spreading crown of a great oak in the prime of its life - it's own little world to a colourful variety of beetles, spiders and more in its branches - that was once here or could yet be again. Each living thing has its time - mine is now, and the ghost tree has had or will have its time too. There is some comfort in that, and an opportunity to reach an equanimity of mind that might be just what my meditation teachers were hoping to pass on.
