July 2017. As we depart from O’Cebreiro and enter the forest that wends down into the Navia Valley, Lou casts her daily intention into the dimming stars. 

“Today I walk for my mom,” she declares into the darkness. 

S. and I acknowledge it silently as Lou’s mom materializes in my mind. If it is the village that raises the child, she is in every sense my auntie, my elder, my second mother.  On the cusp of her retirement in January she had received an initial diagnosis of cancer, but the prognosis was only confirmed a week before Lou left to join me—her cancer is endemic.  Chemotherapy will prolong her life, but never save it. 

I look up through the dark arms of the Evergreen Oaks and Portuguese Oaks, marveling at the silent intelligence of the trees.  By what wisdom do they grow up and out to exhibit crown shyness, commanding their plot of sky without colonizing others’ space? Beyond the small crest of its revealing dip, each limb reaches to the periphery of another body without ever touching. It is enough, each body seems to say, to live nobly and ceremoniously as neighbors. Where shadow begins, their property lines end.

As I marvel at them, my thoughts drift back to Lou’s practice of intention-making these past three days.  In a way my friend and I have always been like the trees we walk beneath—growing side by side in spurts and through dry seasons without ever fully being aware of the character of the company we kept, the roots that mingled with ours. Then one day we found our arms thick and heavy with life, lifted toward one another and the heavens, having grown strong and sheltering. 

And yet, ours may be a kinship of different species . . . at least where the matter of spirituality is concerned. For all my spiritual leanings, I find her practice of intention-making something of a mystery. What exactly is an intention? I think to myself.  Is it a petition or a prayer? What should one be focused on while making it—and to what end?  I sense that it is not the right time to ask, but as Lou and S. fall into a more athletic pace ahead of me these questions linger in my mind. 

The sun is well above the horizon when we stop for the morning’s café con leche in Fonfria several hours later.   Bar Lopez lies at the very heart of this one-direction crossroad of humanity.  We find a place within the crowd lingering on the terrace of the bodega, and sit with our beverages in hand, talking about our mornings.

Lou and S. have been fast-walking all morning, but perhaps they have overextended—both of them have drank two juices in the time that I’ve taken a sip of my coffee. 

“How are you doing?” Lou asks, looking at my sandaled feet.  For twenty-five days I’ve been walking with Birkenstocks, after I developed a painful tendonitis in my right heel.  Wearing sandals, I haven’t had a single issue. 

I raise my hand as if to brush off the comment and thereby shift the conversation.  “The real question is, how are you?” 

“I’m okay,” she says with affirmation.  Strangely, I believe her.  It isn’t that all-too familiar Midwestern pleasantry she is offering me. . . her face is full of loving acceptance. “I so wish she would have been able to do the things she wanted to do before she got sick.”

“Oh, I know,” I say with a sigh, feeling my own grief encroaching. Through her thirty-five-year tenure as a nurse, Sue had worked so hard, regularly picking up overtime, third-shift hours, and weekends.  She loved her work but had put off the bucket list of things she wanted to do and see and experience. Or maybe she simply enjoyed filling it up with dreams—that’s possible too. She was a calming force—she seemed consummately content with her life. But there were things that, given the chance, she would have looked forward to doing through her long retirement. Now she would be wedded to a cycle of chemical treatments that left little flexibility to cross off items on that list.    

Lou looks at S. and then to me, and leans in, encircling her glass with her hands. “My mom has taught me so much.  But one of the most important things is this: not to wait to do the things you feel called to do.”

I nod, my eyes involuntarily drifting sideways to glance at my daughter.  I am so saddened by the thought of Sue’s disappointments, however minor they may be in the greater scheme of a life well and generously lived.  But I am more deeply saddened by how they have impressed themselves on my soul friend.  How many times is our final legacy for our children marked by a via negativa—a sort of path of negation—as we commit to not making the same choices as our parents did, avoiding the same fates. 

“It must feel terrible to know that all of this is happening while you are so far away,” I say softly.  How are you managing it?”

She looks at me and smiles with such compassion, it is as if I am the one with the terminally ill parent. “I’m keeping her in my intentions,” she reminds me. “I will be there when I can—as soon as I return I and the girls will drive down to see them.  In the interim, I am pouring my love and gratitude that I have for her toward her, and a bright healing light, that she receives my energy.”

I nod.  Although I mean to give her more as one of my closest and most beloved friends, it is nonetheless the nod of the polite.  I have been reduced to a linguistically deficient but well-meaning tourist who lacks the slightest modicum of comprehension.  In truth, on hearing the words ‘bright healing light’ a vision of Lou wearing a purple turban and an Iron Man-esque body armor materialized in my mind.  I imagined her tapping her chest and charging up her life-force, sending a bright hot current of electricity across the dimensions into her mother’s heart.  The supernatural frou-frou deliciousness of the vision kindles my delight even if . . . even if it seems straight out of the comics.

In the end it is I who falls back into the Midwestern niceness we were weaned on.

“That’s so wonderful,” I say, smiling.  I pick up my coffee to do something with my hands. “I hope she receives every ounce of it.”

Resuming our journey some forty minutes later, I feel a lingering guilt at not honoring Lou’s spiritual practice with the open curiosity I generally have.  And now there is no opportunity to talk: the three of us have separated again, my two athletic companions far ahead. 

I find a gentle distraction from my own unease in Galicia’s forest canopy. It is changing as we descend, with beech and chestnut starting to make their presence known. With its rise of old growth trees, moss-covered undergrowth, and natural terraces set into the hillside, this truly is a mystical forest, if there ever could said to be one.  I imagine it numinous and luminous at either turning of the day.  My heart slows even as it makes me catch my breath at the thought of what mysteries it holds, all its ancient wisdom. 

I may not be all in on the idea that humans can project our energy across space and time, but I have no difficulty believing that they have something on us, these trees — they are the elder statesmen of this sacred world. 

“I’m listening,” I whisper out loud.

Lofted on the soft breeze that is funneling through the valley, the canopy of carefully distant, almost touching bodies seems to whisper back.

DECEMBER 2020.  After three and a half years staving off the cancer through chemotherapy, Sue has chosen to stop the viscous cycle of treating illness with illness and will quickly pass away.  I in turn have discovered a tumor in my neck—a lipoma nestled in what my surgeons call “expensive real estate.”  It lies in a net formed by my spinal column, the vagus nerve that regulates my heartbeat, and my carotid artery. 

As soon as I shared the disconcerting news with Lou a few months ago, her unwavering practice of sending healing intentions began.  They were familiar and endearing, even if I still didn’t wholly understand what they were or buy into them. “I’m sending you white healing energy,” she would tell me.  It didn’t matter in the same way as getting an unintentionally ugly sweater from my grandmother at Christmas didn’t matter; all I felt was love.

During my biopsies and prognosis testing I embraced Lou’s intentions as evidence of her unfailing friendship and received them with open arms and a cheerful ‘you be you’ spirit; I could have never imagined I would have ever embraced intention-making as a practice myself.  It was the trees, in the end, that led me to understand and adopt it as a practice.  It was the trees, in the end, that brought me into intention-making’s power.

MAY 2021.  In the waiting area of the Hope Clinic, I have found an open chair and sat down, haphazardly opening the slight volume I brought to read while waiting for my biopsy.  It’s The Hidden Life of Trees, by German forester Peter Wohlleben.  Within minutes, I am rapt.  Wohlleben carefully unpacks one solid, explosive truth about trees: they talk.  Not via a lexicon and phonetic system, but through other currencies — scent, vibration, even through electrical currents within their neuron-like root systems and the complex of grey-matter-like symbiotic fungi that support them. 

While reading the chapter I’ve opened to, I marvel at his description of phytoncides—the blessed speech-like chemicals that the trees pass to one another through the air to communicate the community’s risks and rewards, danger and delight. 

Much research, Wohlleben intimates, suggests that humans benefit from walking through the waft of these phytoncides.  He cites studies in Korea and Japan, which have found that forest bathing not only has a reductive effect on cortisol, heart rate and pressure, but also an aggregate effect on the development of natural killer cells in the body, the ones that go on the offense against cancer cells and those replicating other diseases.

As fascinating as this is, it isn’t the health properties of the trees’ airborne communication system that most excite me.  It is the fact that they use non-verbal communication systems in their roots, trunks and leaves to commune with their peers—peers who are sometimes miles away.  Given the right breeze and temperature, the trees seamlessly send and receive messages to one another, without a sound ever having been uttered.

Wohlleben’s descriptions of this process take me back to that day in Galicia when, while entering the forest, Lou began consciously sending silent messages of love for her mother out into the world.  They take me back into the sensation that I have often been feeling during these months of diagonostic tests and specialist visits—one I can only describe as love washing over me, seemingly from nowhere. I finally understand intention: we are like trees uprooted and free to wander, but ever silently connected to and communicating with our tribe.

JULY 2021.  “I need rest from work,” Nabali admits in a text. 

This is impeccably timed, I think to myself.  I am sitting in the Munich airport waiting to board the plane for my long-awaited return to Spain.  Reading his words, I feel a deep swell of purpose roll over me . . . one that ebbs into clarity. 

I have a prognosis, I have a pilgrimage to take to prepare for a surgery ahead . . .  and now I have a spiritual practice to, well, practice. During my pilgrim journey my intentions will be for my beloved friend, for the preservation of his peace and well-being.

Though acceptance of it percolated slow, I decided to adopt Lou’s practice of intention-making this past spring. (Actually, if we’re being honest, the decision entailed a zealous leap of faith.  It’s akin to what I felt when I became a mother—something I embraced intuitively but which scared the living shit out of me when I actually thought about it straight on.)

I pause before replying, nervous.  “I am in Munich, departing for my yearlong delayed pilgrimage in Spain,” I reply.  “I’ll be walking with intentions in my heart and mind.  One of them will be that you get the rest that you need. Be well.”

As I put away my phone and stand to board the plane, I feel a desire for his peace filling me up like a cup of warm bergamot tea.  I slowly exhale, and the intention wafts off lightly, moist and fragrant in the air.  I imagine it mingling with the sunlight and other stars’ dust while finding its way home to the heart it was formed for. 

Perhaps my intentions will catch up with him when he is cutting fruit in the kitchen for the night’s meal or putting down the phone after a conference call.  Perhaps they will reach him in his dreams, or while he takes a walk, or is spending time with his wife and sons. Whether or not he is ready to receive my heart’s energy, he will.  It may manifest itself as a feeling or a thought, perhaps an acutely beautiful dream or mood.  I have come to believe that my joy, delight, concern, and care will swathe him in a newness of being, as if he were a long-anticipated child, newly born.

On my pilgrim’s journey through the Tramontana the next two weeks I pass through the burnt sienna forests of holm-oaks and Aleppo pines knowing and feeling myself to be one among them. Within the elements we are wind swept and ruddied—creatures of peace and slow steady growth, fierce courtesy and contemplative silence. Together but seemingly alone, they and I, we are all silently communicating to our distant others, both at the root level and on the salty sea winds. 

At dawn and dusk I direct energy toward my extraordinarily busy, entrepreneurial friend, energy that encourages his restorative rest. During the quiet moments to be had along the way I circle back to the practice again and again and again, and through the cycle of days I feel my own heart slowing and centering.  It is as if the care I am sending has not only found its mark but is being sent back. I receive the energy with open arms, invigorated by its power.

– Megan Muthupandiyan