Post No.7. Monday morning

June Oakcrest. Monday—an offering the best way to begin. 

Work starts tomorrow. I have spreadsheets, three patient clients, and a laptop that has been giving me reproachful looks since the weekend. Today I was supposed to be responsible. 

Instead, I was in the garden by nine. 

I put on your coat. I took the honey from the market and a small cup of water, exactly the way your notebook described—mixing them to pour at the roots, an offering, not a deposit. Something given back to the earth rather than placed on top of it. I crouched at the base of the oak and poured slowly into the soil where the roots first break the surface. I didn't say anything; your notebook said you don't go with words.

You go with attention. So I stood up, put both hands on the bark, and gave it everything I had. 

✦   ✦   ✦

The warmth started in my palms.

Not the warmth of bark in the morning sun— It was something coming from inside the tree, moving up through my hands, into my wrists, climbing my arms slowly like heat finding its way through old pipes. And then it reached my chest and settled here. Like a hand placed over a heart. Like something saying: I have you. You are not alone here. You have never been alone here. 

My breath caught. I couldn't move. The warmth stayed, patient and enormous, and I felt something in me that had been holding tight for forty-five years just… give. Just release.

I cried. I hadn't once since I arrived. I just stood there and wept quietly, the way you cry when something true reaches you before you've had time to prepare for it. Not sobbing. Just tears running down my face while my hands stayed flat against the bark. The warmth held me, the oak held me, and I stood there in your coat in the morning cold and simply let myself be held. The squirrel appeared on a branch above my head and stayed without moving. I don't know how long he was there. Long enough. Just long enough. The way he does. 

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And then the warmth shifted. 

Not leaving—just changing. It moved from my chest outward, spreading through my whole body like something settling into place. And in that settling, an image arrived in my mind that I know— I know— was not mine.

A man. Older. Standing in a clearing deep in the wood among native wildflowers— low and dense and very still. Just standing there with his hands at his sides, the way you stand somewhere you belong completely. The light came through the canopy onto his gray hair.

I knew without deciding to know: Edmund. My feet started moving before my mind could protest. I took the dark trail— the one I'd been avoiding since my first morning—and Mom, I need to tell you what that felt like. The dark trail was not dark for me today, though I could feel its potential to be. I could feel the choice. This path asks something of you. My senses sharpened. My heart picked up—not from fear, but from attention. The same kind the oak wanted. The kind where you're completely present and completely available.

The light came down through the canopy in long, slow columns. My eyes adjusted to the green-gold of it. And the forest seemed to walk with me. The path was uneven at first—rocks breaking through the soil, then stretches of bare dirt, then pine needles that softened everything underfoot into a cushioned silence. Surprised by the change, I looked up and realized I was in a pine forest. I don't know exactly when it happened— the trees had simply changed around me while I was walking. The light was different here. Filtered. Green and cool. The smell of resin, of something dry and old. I walked slowly. Watching the light move. Listening to my own footsteps. Something in me went quiet.

 I noticed the density of the air, the particular hush of a pine floor, the way sound moves differently when the ground is soft. 

And then, at the edge of the pines, the sun came through. The air changed as I drew close. It grew warmer. More alive. The wildflowers were exactly as I'd seen them in the vision—low and dense, breathing in the morning. And the man was there, in the meadow, precisely as he'd appeared. Standing still, hands at his sides.   

He turned before I made a sound. 

He looked at me for a long moment with very calm, very dark eyes. The kind of eyes that have been paying attention to growing things for a very long time. Then he said,  

"You look like your mother."

"I'm June," I said.

"I know," he replied simply. "I've been waiting for you." 

It was a statement of fact. Like something that had already been decided long before I ever arrived on this hill.

✦   ✦   ✦

We stood in the clearing for a long time without speaking, the wildflowers between us, the light filtering down. The squirrel was watching from somewhere in the branches—I could feel him, even though I couldn't see him.

Edmund didn't ask why I was here or how I found him. He just looked at me with complete attention and waited. Before I finally turned to leave the clearing, he looked down at my hands.

"The tree chose well," he murmured. I wrote it down the moment I got back so I wouldn't forget. 

When I reached the base of the oak again, I checked the roots. The honey I had poured into the soil was completely gone— the earth was bone dry— without a single trace left behind…

I looked back up at the house. This man knows what you know, Mom. Or what you were trying to protect. He knows what happened on this hill. And he's been waiting for me to be ready to listen. 

What he told me next deserves its own letter. I need one more night with it before I write it down, because I need to sit with what it means. I need to understand what the oak was preparing me for when it held me this morning. 

Tomorrow, I promise. 

Still in your coat. The oak visible from the window.

June