From The Solace of Fierce Landscapes by Belden Lane:

Telling Stories by Firelight

I spent the rest of the day doing nothing—appraising ironwood trees, surveying the shape of passing clouds, taking time to renew my acquaintance with sun­light and running water. Later that evening, after the sun had set and I’d eaten supper, I sat beside a small campfire, noticing a pine tree—about two and a half feet tall-across the fire from me. I hadn’t seen it before.

Not usually accustomed to talking to trees, I said hello, feeling a sense of commonality around the fire together. As we sat there, the young tree, almost like a child, seemed to be asking for a story. Fires have a way of suggesting such things. So I told it one. It was a long story, and at times I had to stop to explain things in a way that trees would understand. Storytellers, after all, must adjust their tales to their listeners.

With night coming on, I added another stick to the fire. The wood blazed up, and I suddenly noticed three or four other small pines gathered around us. I could have sworn they hadn’t been there earlier when I’d set up camp. I suspect they had moved in closer to be able to hear better. So I continued telling all of them this tale of transformation, a sacred story from the Lakota Sioux about dy­ing and returning to the earth. I told it patiently to these young trees, not realiz­ing at the time the mystery into which I myself was being drawn.

As a storyteller, I don’t ever remember listeners as attentive as the ones I had that night. The trees were mesmerized by the tale; I could tell. This was the first time they’d ever heard a story. Few people, if any, venture very far into that wilderness; and the ones that do aren’t likely to tell stories to trees. Besides, the truth of the story was something they already knew. These trees understood in­timately the reality of death and transformation. They’d just survived a flash flood of raging water. They were growing out of the rotted logs of old pines along the creek bank. Yet even this didn’t explain the intensity with which they seemed to be listening to the tale.  Something deeper still was drawing them into its mystery as we sat together around the fire.

I suddenly realized what it was—these young trees growing in a remote wil­derness area had never before seen flames leaping in the air like fireflies in liquid motion. Over the three or four years of their lives, they’d never witnessed a for­est fire. Nor was it likely anyone had ever built a campfire nearby. They were lis­tening to a story of death, with both fascination and terror, as they watched wood burn.

They had never imagined the stuff-of-their-own-being turned into the light and beauty they saw before them, never dreamed of wood disappearing so quickly into a light gray ash. Hearing the story as they heard it, I found a whole new way of looking at my mother’s dying, as well as my own way of living. The common fear of death that I’d shared with these trees in the back country of Missouri was absorbed into their own wonder at the mystery of transformation. I knew then why I’d been brought there.

Buddhist teachers say that to discover God as “child,” recognizing the deep vulnerability and wonder that lies at the heart of the Holy, is one of the highest levels of spiritual encounter. I grasped something of this truth as the coals burned low and the small trees receded back into the shadows that night on Upper Moss Creek.

I don’t ever remember sleeping any better or feeling any safer than I did that night alone in the woods. I’d been welcomed. I’d become family. The young trees and I, along with their elders, more distant and still, had been gathered in community around a small fire, sharing a truth that somehow touched us all. The next morning I took a few hours to walk farther down the creek, stopping often, being content to sit for long spells in silence. The thought occurred to me that all the place really needed (if it needed anything at all) was an old man, low in impact on the land and high in the capacity to take delight.

I walked that morning like God in the Garden of Eden, knowing I’d been able to give something back to the place in the process of “telling” the night before. The act of speaking by the fire had been a powerful one. I’d spoken to and for the trees. They’d listened in wonder, hearing a story for the first time in their lives. And I, too, by entering into their hearing of it, had heard its truth more deeply than ever before. That morning I walked as an honored being, welcomed, taking joy in every velvety cluster of green moss, every patch of white lichens tipped in red. The trees might have marveled at my ability to move so easily among them. Maybe they also pitied me for my lack of rootedness. But I walked in their midst with a respect and love I’d never before known in the wilds.

There’s a time in every storyteller’s life when a threshold is crossed—when he receives a sense of calling, a quiet certainty about one’s vocation. Prior to this time he may have called himself a story-collector, a great lover of tales, a person even addicted to narrative, but he’d always shrunk from calling himself a Story­teller. This was because he’d recognized the gift of telling as ultimately the gift of the shaman, the magician and healer, a gift that’s never claimed, but only and al­ways “conferred.” For years I’ve told stories in teaching and, from time to time, at storytelling festivals and conferences. But this experience of being heard by a handful of pine trees in an Ozark wilderness finally pushed me over the edge, re­quiring that I acknowledge—humbly, and with amazement—that I, too, am storyteller. A storyteller is one who watches the stuff-of-his-own-being trans­formed into wonder through a shared process of listening and dying.