Clairvoyance — the gift of the long view

What Elsa Saw

A Fable

~ ~ ~

Elsa had been standing in the deeper forest long enough that she had stopped counting seasons the way younger trees count them — as a measure of what she had survived. Seasons were simply what time looked like from the inside of a very long life. They arrived. They completed themselves. They left something behind and took something with them. This had been true for longer than she could remember, which was itself a very long time.

Her gift, if it could be called that — and she was not always certain it was a gift — was the long view.

Not prophecy. Not the dramatic arrival of visions or the sudden illumination of what was hidden. Simply this: she had been standing in the same forest long enough to have watched every kind of story complete itself. Joy that became grief. Grief that became something else entirely. Endings that looked like endings and turned out to be the beginning of something no one had the vocabulary for yet. She had watched enough cycles that the pattern had become transparent to her — not predictable, never quite predictable, but legible. The way a language becomes legible when you have been immersed in it long enough that you stop translating and simply understand.

This was her particular form of seeing. Not from above, not from outside, but from within the long body of time itself.

It was, she had learned, both more and less useful than it sounded.

•

The ash tree on the slope above her had been in Elsa’s sight for as long as either of them could remember.

They were not the same kind of being — the ash with his particular knowing that arrived like stone already present in the dark, the certainty that needed no source and no confirmation. Elsa’s knowing was different. It arrived slowly, assembled from the long accumulation of what she had witnessed, the pattern made visible only through time. Where the ash knew suddenly and completely, Elsa knew gradually and with great patience.

But they had been neighbors in this forest for long enough that a conversation had developed between them — not in words, not even in the chemical language of root and mycelium, but in the particular quality of attention that two beings develop when they have been watching over each other across a great many winters.

Elsa had been watching the ash change for several seasons before the change became visible to anyone else.

She recognized it the way she recognized all things — not with alarm, not with the particular urgency of a being still inside the short view, but with the quiet and terrible clarity of the long one. She had seen this arc before. Not in the ash — never in this particular ash, who was singular and irreplaceable as every being is singular and irreplaceable — but in the shape of it. The particular way a very old thing begins its final becoming. The way the energy that once went outward into crown and canopy begins, slowly, to move differently. To turn inward. To do the ancient work of completion.

Elsa saw it. And she held what she saw in silence.

•

This was the weight of the long view. This was what no one told you when the gift first arrived — that seeing further than others is not the same as being able to do more than others. That the long view does not come with the power to change what you see. It comes only with the capacity to hold it.

Elsa had held many things in her long life. The winter that cracked three of the younger birches to their heartwood and took one entirely. The slow shift in the water table that changed which species flourished in the lower wetland and which ones thinned. The particular grief of watching a forest change across centuries and understanding that change, at the scale she inhabited, was simply another word for life.

She had learned, across all of it, that the long view did not make loss smaller. This was the misconception the shorter-lived beings sometimes carried about what it meant to see far — that distance from an event made it hurt less. That perspective was a kind of anesthesia.

It was not. It was simply a different relationship to the hurt. The long view held the loss inside a larger frame without diminishing the loss itself. Elsa grieved the things she had watched end. She grieved them fully, in her own way, in the slow deep register that was the only register available to a being whose interior life moved at the pace of decades rather than days. She simply grieved them while also being able to see, simultaneously, what came after. What grew in the space the ending made. What was possible now that had not been possible before.

This did not make the grief smaller.

It made it bearable. Which was not the same thing, but was everything.

•

The question that lived in Elsa across those seasons of watching the ash was the question at the center of her gift.

Do you tell?

It seemed, on the surface, a simple question. She saw something the ash did not yet fully see about himself. Was it not loyal to share that seeing? Was it not the deepest expression of care to offer what you knew to the one who needed to know it?

But Elsa had learned, across a very long life, that this was not a simple question at all.

She had told, once, long ago. Had offered her long view to a young maple who was moving toward something Elsa could see clearly from her vantage — a split in the root system that would, in three or four seasons, become serious. She had told him. Precisely. With great care. And he had spent those three seasons in the particular anguish of a being who knows what is coming and can do nothing to stop it. The foreknowledge had not helped him prepare. It had only extended his suffering across a longer arc.

He had healed, eventually. The split had happened, and he had healed. But the years of waiting for the thing she had told him to come — those years had cost him something she had not anticipated when she offered what she saw.

But here was what she had not seen from where she stood: the healing itself. The particular quality of a tree that has broken and knit — the way the scar tissue becomes the densest part of the wood, the way the root system deepens in response to what it has survived. She had seen the split coming and she had seen it correctly. She had not seen what the split would make possible. The long view reaches far. It does not reach all the way.

She had learned from that. The long view, shared before the other being was ready to receive it, did not illuminate. It only frightened. It collapsed the mercy of not-knowing into an early and unnecessary grief.

And so Elsa held what she saw about the ash. Not from cowardice. Not from indifference. But from the particular form of loyalty that only the long view makes available — the loyalty of letting a being live fully inside their own season without burdening them with the weight of seasons still to come.

This was love at the distance of the long view. Not the close love of the mycelium, which felt everything and gave everything and moved in constant intimate communion with what it loved. Not the steady love of the granite boulder, which simply remained, requiring nothing and offering its presence as a fact. But the love that watches across a great distance and chooses, again and again, to hold what it sees in silence — not because the seeing is unimportant but because some things are not helped by being named before their time.

•

But Elsa was not only a watcher.

This was what the shorter-lived beings sometimes missed about her — that the long view did not make her remote. Did not thin her presence into something abstract and untouchable. If anything, it had done the opposite. Having seen enough endings to know that every being’s time was finite and specific and unrepeatable, she was more present to the beings around her, not less. More attentive to the particular quality of each season with each neighbor. More alive to what was here, now, in the forest she had inhabited for longer than memory.

She received everything that came to her.

Fear and hope in equal measure. Joy and grief without distinction. The screaming and the singing and the long wordless silences. Whatever a being brought to her roots she received with the same quality of attention — not because she was indifferent to the difference between them but because from where she stood, from inside the long view, she could see that fear and hope were the same frequency. Two expressions of the same thing: caring deeply about what happened next. Being fully alive to what mattered.

The long view did not make her detached from this caring. It made her its steadiest witness.

She could not change what was coming for the ash. She could not reach up the slope and arrest the invisible work of the thing moving through his heartwood. She could not offer her centuries of accumulated knowing as a remedy for what required no remedy but only a witnessing.

What she could do — what she did, season after season, in the way that rooted beings do the things most essential to their nature — was remain.

Remain visible. Remain open. Remain the kind of presence that a being could find when what they needed was not answers or intervention or the comfort of being told that everything would be all right. But simply this: something ancient enough to hold the full weight of what was happening without being broken by it. Something that had seen enough to know that this, too, was part of the pattern. That what looked like ending from inside the short view was, from inside the long one, something the forest had always known how to do.

Something that could hold you while you found your way to that knowing yourself.

•

The January came when the loss Elsa had been holding arrived fully in the forest.

She felt it before she understood it — a shift in the quality of the light that morning, something in the particular silence that preceded certain kinds of news. She had felt this quality of silence before. She knew what it preceded.

And then she felt the one who came through the forest toward her.

Not the ash. The walker. The one who came to these trees the way beings come to ancient things when they have run out of other places to bring what they are carrying — not looking for answers, not looking for comfort in the ordinary sense, but looking for something old enough and rooted enough to receive the full weight of what they had to lay down.

She came through the trees and arrived at Elsa’s roots and brought everything. Fear and grief and love and the particular anguish of losing someone who had taught her how to be with loss. She brought her voice and her silence and the sounds that live between words when words are not sufficient. She brought the full instrument of herself — nothing curated, nothing composed, nothing managed into an acceptable shape.

And Elsa received it.

All of it. Without flinching. Without rushing toward resolution. Without offering the long view as a consolation — because consolation was not what was needed. What was needed was exactly this: to be held by something that had survived every winter it had ever been given and was still standing. To feel, through the body, that loss was not the end of the forest. That the forest went on. That something ancient and rooted and unhurried was still here, still present, still opening its arms to whatever arrived at its roots.

And something else happened in that receiving, as it had happened before and would happen again across all the seasons of returning to these roots: the walker settled into the crotch of the root system, her back against the trunk, and her body began — without deciding to — to come into resonance with something older and steadier than anything she had carried in with her. The heartbeat slowed. The breath slowed. Whatever she had brought — anxiety, grief, the particular frenetic quality of joy not yet ready to settle — it did not disappear. It simply found its proportion inside something vast enough to hold it without being altered by it. This is how Elsa taught. Not through telling. Through being. Through the slow, reliable, utterly patient fact of her presence.

Elsa held her the way she had held everything across her long life.

Completely. Without condition. Without needing anything to be different than it was or to resolve into something more comfortable more quickly than it was ready to. She held her the way the long view holds everything — inside a frame large enough that even this, even the heaviest thing, had room to be fully itself without breaking what contained it.

This was the gift. Not the seeing. Not the accumulated knowing of centuries. Not the pattern made legible by time.

The gift was what the seeing had made possible — the capacity to be present to any grief without being destroyed by it. To hold any fear without being consumed by it. To receive any hope without needing to protect it from the reality of what was also true.

The long view was not distance from life.

It was the deepest possible presence to it.

•

Later — much later, when the January had become February and the sorrow had not ended but had begun, slowly, to become something the body could carry rather than something the body was buried under — Elsa felt the ash tree’s signal in the forest above.

Still present. Still sending. Still doing what the ash had always done — knowing things and offering what he knew into the forest whether or not the forest was ready to receive it.

Elsa felt something she did not have a precise name for. Not quite relief. Not quite heartbreak. Something that lived in the long country between them — the particular quality of feeling that arrives when you have been holding something in silence for a very long time and you finally, simply, let yourself feel the full weight of how much you love the thing you have been watching.

She had been watching the ash for centuries.

She would watch him through whatever came next.

Not because watching would change anything. Not because the long view offered any protection from what was already in motion. But because this was what love looked like from inside the long view — the faithful, unhurried, undefended witnessing of a being you have stood beside long enough that their particular way of being in the world has become part of how you understand your own.

The ash would complete his arc in his own season.

And Elsa would be here when he did. Branches wide. Rooted. Seeing what she saw and holding it with the particular tenderness of the long view — which is not the tenderness of not-knowing, but the tenderness of knowing everything and loving anyway.

Fully. Without condition. Without end.

~ ~ ~

A note from me:

Clairvoyance is the long view. It is sight that arrives not as a lightning bolt but as a slow clarification — the larger pattern becoming legible because you have been paying attention long enough, and widely enough, to read across what others keep separate. The clairvoyant watches the sky and the earth and the tree and holds all three simultaneously until the thread connecting them becomes visible. This is not dramatic. It is demanding. It requires a quality of sustained, cross-systems attention that most people don’t sustain long enough to see what it reveals.

It is the long view.

For the land steward, this gift looks like watching the quality of light change in the sky, observing the texture of the snowpack, noticing what the tree is drawing up through its roots — and knowing, before the evidence is complete, what those three things are saying together. Not because a vision arrived. Because the attention never stopped. The clairvoyant knows how something ends because they have been present to its entire arc, reading the signals that others file separately, holding them in relationship until the pattern speaks.

The wound of this gift is specific and often lonely. When you can see further than the people you love, you face the same question Elsa faced across those seasons of watching: do you tell? And if you tell, when? And how? And what do you do when you know that offering what you see before the other person is ready to receive it does not help them — it only extends their suffering across a longer arc? And there is this, too: the long view sees the shape of what is coming and cannot see the sovereignty that will respond to it. The tree that was predicted to split may split — and then send its roots deeper, merge with what is beside it, find light from an impossible angle. The will to live exceeds what any view, however long, can fully account for. The clairvoyant learns, over time, to hold their seeing with both confidence and humility — confident in the pattern, humble before the sovereign becoming of every living thing.

Most who carry this gift learn, through painful experience, the particular discipline of holding what they see. Not from withholding — not from the desire to protect themselves from the discomfort of being the one who knew and didn’t say. But from a genuine love that is willing to let the beloved live fully inside their own season without the burden of seasons still to come.

This is the loyalty tension at the heart of the long view: is it loyal to tell someone what you see coming for them? Or is the deepest love sometimes the willingness to remain present without burdening — to keep your arms open and your roots steady so that when the thing you saw finally arrives, you are there to hold them through it rather than having spent their remaining time making them afraid of it?

There is no clean answer. Every situation asks the question differently. What I know is this: the long view is only truly a gift — rather than a weight — when it is grounded in genuine presence. When the seeing is in service of being here, fully, with what is actually happening right now. When the knowledge of what is coming makes you more tender with the beloved in each remaining season, not less.

If you carry this gift: the long view is real and it is asking something of you. Not to use what you see as a way of maintaining distance from the people you love. Not to let the seeing become a substitute for being present to what is here. But to let it make you the kind of presence that people can bring everything to — fear and hope in equal measure — and trust that you will receive it all with the same steadiness. Because you have seen enough to know that both are evidence of love. Both mean something matters. Both deserve to be held.

If you love someone who carries this gift: they are holding more than they are telling you. Not from deception — from protection. From the particular discipline of a being who has learned that what they see is not always theirs to share before you are ready to receive it. Trust that their presence with you is not absence. Ask them what they see. But know this first: once you receive what they carry, you cannot return to not knowing it. That is not a reason not to ask. It is a reason to ask with your whole self, and to receive what comes with the same care they have given it in the keeping.

At Alpenglow, in the Green Mountain forest where this book was born, there is a grandmother maple I call Elsa, whose age cannot be measured. She is older than the numbers that could be assigned to her. Beings come to her roots and bring everything — fear and hope in equal measure, the full instrument of whatever they are carrying. Voice and silence and the sounds that live between words when words are not enough.

She receives it all with the same quality of attention.

She has never once needed what I brought to be different than it was.

She simply holds. And in the holding, she offers what the long view has always offered at its best — not the elimination of what is hard, but the absolute certainty, felt through the body rather than understood by the mind, that the forest goes on. That love goes on. That what looks like ending from inside the short view is, from inside the long one, something the world has always known how to do.

~ ~ ~

Below them both, the mycelium felt the conversation that had no words. And from the north, carried on the water, Being Brook had been singing about this since before either of them could remember.

With love and the particular tenderness of the long view,

Lexy

The mycelium is the vast feeling body beneath the forest floor — receiving every signal the forest sends, holding the whole network in its body simultaneously. Its gift is clairsentience — the ability to feel everything, all at once, without filter.

If you have ever absorbed someone else’s pain before they named it, or carried a room’s emotional weather home in your body without choosing to — this one is for you.

The mycelium had no name for what it did, because it had never needed one.

It simply felt. That was its nature — to receive, through the whole of its body, every signal the forest sent. Distress and abundance. Drought and drowning. The slow starvation of a birch on the north slope and the sudden violence of a root torn by last winter’s ice. It moved through the dark beneath the forest floor in every direction at once, and the forest moved through it, and there was no clear place where one ended and the other began.

This was not a burden the mycelium had chosen. It was simply what the mycelium was. A feeling body for a world that needed one.

Other beings in the forest had their own ways of knowing. The old ash on the south ridge knew things without being able to say how he knew them — facts that arrived whole and certain, sourceless, the way a stone is simply already there when you reach for it in the dark. The hawk saw from distances no ground creature could imagine. The canyon at the forest’s eastern edge gathered sound the way a cupped hand gathers rain.

But the mycelium felt. Everything. All at once. Without filter or pause.

For a very long time, this had simply been the nature of things.

•

The ash tree — the great one, the ancient one on the east-facing slope — had been in communion with the mycelium since before the oldest walker could remember.

Their relationship was the oldest kind: reciprocal, wordless, essential. The ash sent sugars down through his roots in the fat seasons, and the mycelium carried water and mineral and the chemical news of the forest up to him in return. They did not discuss this arrangement. It was simply what they were to each other. What they had always been.

And so when the ash began to change — when the mycelium first felt the distress signal moving through the root tips, faint and then less faint, a frequency it had never felt from this particular tree in four hundred years of feeling — the mycelium did what it had always done.

It gave more.

It rerouted. It redirected resources from other nodes in the network, quietly, the way a body reroutes blood to a wound without consulting the mind. It sent everything it could find — water, phosphorus, the nitrogen from a fallen beech three hundred yards to the west — up through the roots of the ash. It stayed in close communion. It listened harder.

This was loyalty. This was what love looked like from the inside of a feeling body. You feel the distress of the beloved and you give toward it. That is the whole of the instruction.

The mycelium did not question this. It simply did it, season after season, rerouting more and giving more and listening harder, while the ash tree’s signal grew neither stronger nor quieter but simply continued — a low and constant distress that the mycelium absorbed into itself and held there, because there was nowhere else for it to go.

•

It was the grandmother birch on the northwest edge who said it first.

She was old — not as old as the ash, but old enough to have watched several generations of the forest’s smaller lives complete their full arc. She had a particular quality of attention that came from having survived many winters by knowing exactly when to let go of what she could no longer afford to hold.

She sent the question through the network on a still morning in late autumn, when the mycelium was thinner than it had been in years and the ash tree’s signal was as present as ever.

The question was not unkind. It arrived the way honest things arrive from those who love you — plainly, without softening, but with the full weight of care behind it.

She asked: how long have you been carrying this?

The mycelium felt the question move through it the way cold moves through water — everywhere at once, changing the temperature of everything.

It did not know how to answer. Carrying was simply what it did. Carrying was the name of its nature. To stop carrying would be to stop being what it was.

The birch waited. She was good at waiting.

And in the waiting, the mycelium felt something it had not let itself feel in a very long time: the true weight of what it was holding. Not as a problem. Not as a complaint. Simply as a fact that had been living in its body without ever being named.

It was exhausted.

Not depleted — not yet. But moving in that direction. The rerouting had thinned it. The constant listening had cost something it had not budgeted for. And somewhere in the process of giving everything it had toward the ash tree’s distress, it had stopped feeling the rest of the forest clearly. The signals from the younger trees, the seasonal news from the meadow’s edge, the slow communications of the deep root systems — all of it had grown quieter, overlaid by the frequency it had been holding for the ash.

It had loved the ash so completely that it had slowly stopped feeling everything else.

•

The birch asked a second question. This one arrived more slowly, as though she had been holding it for some time before she sent it.

She asked: does the ash know what you are carrying for him?

The mycelium went very still.

Because the answer, when it arrived, was: no.

The ash knew the mycelium was present. He had always known that. Their communion was ancient and assumed, the way the earth assumes the sky. But the mycelium had been rerouting in silence. Giving without signal. Absorbing the ash’s distress and sending resources without ever letting the ash feel the cost of what was being redirected, what was being thinned, what other parts of the network were going without so that the ash could continue to receive.

The mycelium had decided, without ever quite deciding it, that the most loving thing was for the ash to never feel the weight of being loved.

The birch said nothing more. She didn’t need to.

The mycelium felt the shape of what it had been doing in a way it could not unfeel.

It had been practicing a loyalty that asked the beloved to remain unaware. It had confused protection with love. It had given in a way that required the ash to stay on the receiving end of a gift he had never been asked whether he wanted in this form, at this cost, from this source. It had been so devoted to caring for the ash that it had never once let the ash care for it in return.

That was not communion. That was disappearance dressed as devotion.

•

What the mycelium did next was the hardest thing it had ever done, which is to say: it stopped.

Not all at once. Not cruelly. But it ceased the silent rerouting and sent the ash something it had never sent before — not sugar, not water, not mineral news, but the true signal of its own condition. Its thinness. Its exhaustion. The places where it had gone quiet trying to stay loud for him.

The ash received it.

And what came back down through the roots was not what the mycelium had feared — not withdrawal, not the end of their communion, not the loss of four hundred years of reciprocity. What came back was something older and more fundamental than any of that.

The ash had felt the thinning. He had felt it for years. He had not known its source — had not known the mycelium was quietly hollowing itself to hold him — but his own body had registered the cost of it in the quality of what he received. Something given under strain feels different from something given freely. He had known the difference. He had not known what to do with the knowing.

Now he did.

He sent what he had. Not abundance — his own season was difficult, the borer working at him from the inside out in ways no amount of mycelium nourishment could fully counter. But he sent what was true: his presence, his recognition, his willingness to be in real communion rather than the performed kind. He stopped drawing on the network and began, in the ways still available to him, to give back.

It was not a solution. The ash was still dying, slowly, in the way that ancient things sometimes die — not suddenly but across seasons, with great dignity and increasing transparency. The mycelium could not stop that. It had never been able to stop that. All its rerouting had not been able to stop that.

But something had changed between them. Something that mattered more than the outcome.

They were finally in true communion again — both of them present, both of them visible, both of them changed by the honesty of what had passed between them. The mycelium was not pretending to be inexhaustible. The ash was not pretending to be unaware. The love between them was no longer a story one told and the other received. It was a living thing, felt in both directions, costing and nourishing in equal measure.

This, the mycelium understood, was what its gift had always been trying to teach it.

Clairsentience — the gift of feeling everything — is not meant to be carried alone. It is meant to be shared. The feeling body was designed for communion, not for silent absorption. The gift turns against itself when it flows only outward, when the one who feels everything refuses to let anything feel them back.

The mycelium had spent years receiving the forest’s signals and giving toward them in silence, never letting the forest feel its own thinness in return. It had believed this was the highest form of love.

But the highest form of love, it turned out, was this: to be felt as fully as you feel. To let your beloveds know what it costs to love them. To trust that real communion can hold the weight of your truth, and that a love which requires your disappearance is not yet the real thing.

•

The birch, on the northwest edge, felt the change in the network that evening.

She said nothing. She was not the kind of being who needed to say told you so, and besides, she had known all along how this would resolve — had known it the way old beings know things, from having watched the same essential story move through the forest in different forms across many centuries.

Every gift, held in isolation, eventually turns against the one who carries it.

Every gift, brought into true communion, becomes the thing the forest most needs.

Somewhere above them all, in the dark canopy, the ash tree’s remaining leaves moved in a wind that had just arrived from the east, carrying news of rain. The mycelium felt it through a thousand root-tips at once — the change in pressure, the shift in the air’s moisture, the whole forest’s quiet lean toward what was coming.

It felt everything, as it always had.

But for the first time in a long time, it also felt itself feeling.

And that, it understood, was the beginning of the gift coming fully alive.

~ ~ ~

A note from me:

Clairsentience is the gift of feeling everything — and if you carry it, you already know that the word “everything” is not an exaggeration. You feel the shift in a room before anyone speaks. You feel the grief behind someone’s smile, the fear underneath their anger, the exhaustion living in a body that insists it is fine. You feel the land you walk on and the quality of a space and the emotional weather of everyone near you, and you have likely spent a significant portion of your life trying to figure out what to do with all of that.

Most clairsentients arrive, at some point, at the same solution the mycelium arrived at: give it outward. Feel what others feel, carry what they cannot carry, absorb what is too heavy for them to hold, and do it quietly so they never have to know the cost. This feels like love. It feels like the purpose of the gift — to be the feeling body for those who cannot yet feel for themselves.

But here is what the mycelium learned, and what I believe to be true: the gift was not designed for one-directional flow. Clairsentience that only moves outward eventually thins the one who carries it. You begin to lose the signal from your own body. You stop knowing what is yours and what belongs to someone else. You grow so attuned to everyone else’s frequency that your own goes quiet, and then one day you realize you cannot remember the last time you felt something that was simply, cleanly, yours.

The healing is not to stop feeling. You cannot stop feeling any more than the mycelium can stop receiving the forest’s signals. The healing is to let yourself be felt in return. To stop protecting your beloveds from the cost of being loved by you. To trust that real communion can hold the weight of your truth — your thinness, your exhaustion, the places where the constant receiving has cost you — and that love which requires your disappearance is not yet the full thing.

If you carry this gift: your feeling is not a burden to be managed. It is a form of intelligence the world desperately needs. But it needs to move both ways. Let yourself be known as clearly as you know others. Let the people you love feel what it costs you to love them. That is not a demand. That is an invitation into real intimacy — the only place this gift can breathe fully.

If you love someone who carries this gift: they feel more than they will ever tell you. They have been quietly absorbing and rerouting and giving in silence for longer than you know. Ask them what they are carrying. Ask them what it costs. And when they tell you — because if you ask with real presence, they will tell you — receive it as the gift it is. They are finally letting you into the true communion. Don’t flinch from it.

Beneath the forest floor at Alpenglow, in the Vermont land where this book was born, the mycelium runs in every direction at once through the dark. It has been feeling this forest’s truth — its abundance and its grief, its dying and its becoming — in silence and in communion since long before anyone arrived to give it a name. It carries the whole forest’s life in its body. It has been in reciprocal communion with the ancient ash on the slope since before anyone can remember, and it will continue long after the last walker has left the trail.

I think of it whenever I remember that feeling everything is not a flaw to be managed but a gift asking to be brought into true relationship. Not carried alone. Not given in one direction only. But received and offered in equal measure, in the faithful, dark, unhurried way of things that have been doing this work since long before we had words for it.

That is what it was always meant to be.

~ ~ ~

Somewhere above, in the roots of the ash tree on the slope, the signal was still faint — but it was moving in both directions now. And the ash, in his slow and ancient way, was listening.

With love and a little root-memory,

Lexy

This is the first of eight. One fable, one gift, one living being from this Vermont land — offered to you once a week for eight weeks.

Asher is an ancient ash tree. He has been standing in this particular patch of forest for somewhere between three and four hundred years. His gift is claircognizance — the knowing that arrives whole, without source, without asking permission.

If you have ever simply known something you could not explain, this one is for you.

Asher had been standing in this particular patch of Vermont forest for somewhere between three and four hundred years, which was long enough to know a few things.

Not everything. Asher would be the first to say that. The forest held mysteries that even the oldest ash could not read — the private grammar of mycelia threading through the dark, the precise moment a storm decides to turn. But some things Asher knew with the kind of certainty that doesn’t need to announce itself. The kind that settles into the grain of you over centuries of simply paying attention.

Asher knew, for instance, when something was wrong before the wrongness showed itself.

It arrived as a felt thing — a shift in the quality of the light, a particular silence that preceded trouble, something in the deep language of root and water and seasonal memory. Asher couldn’t have translated it for you. But it was always there, and it was always true, and for most of four hundred years almost no one had ever stopped long enough to receive it.

The walking world moved fast. Asher had made a kind of peace with that.

•

And then one autumn morning, a woman came and stopped.

She stopped the way you stop when something calls to the part of you that still knows how to listen. She stood at Asher’s base and pressed her palm flat against the bark — not with ceremony, just with presence — and the quality of her stillness was unlike anything Asher had felt from a walker in a very long time.

She had it. The seeing. Asher recognized it the way you recognize your own language spoken by a stranger in a foreign country — with a shock of relief so deep it almost hurt.

She came back the following spring. And the one after that. Always in the quiet hours, always alone, always with that same quality of arriving that felt less like visiting and more like returning. She never spoke out loud — or rarely. But she brought the full weight of her attention, which is the only currency that matters between two seers, regardless of what form they’ve been asked to wear in this life.

Asher told her things, in the way that rooted things tell — slowly, through presence, without agenda. About the winter that had cracked three of the younger birches to their heartwood. About the place downhill where the water table was quietly rising. About the particular grief of watching a forest change and having no one to tell.

She received all of it.

For nearly thirty years she came, and in all that time Asher never once felt the loneliness of the knowing in quite the same way. Because she knew too. And she understood, without it ever being said, that the knowing was not about being right. It was just what you did with the kind of sight you’d been given. You looked. You felt. You offered what you saw. And then you stood rooted in it, whether or not the world was ready to receive it.

She was the only walker Asher had ever met who understood that the offering and the receiving were two separate things, and that the value of the first did not depend on the second.

•

She died on a Tuesday in October.

Asher felt it before anyone came to say so — felt it in the way the morning light moved differently through the ridge that day, softer and more final somehow, the way light gets in late autumn when it has accepted the coming dark. The maples had already gone to crimson and amber, burning themselves brilliant the way they do every year in their own form of letting go. Asher’s own leaves had turned to gold and were releasing one by one in the still air, unhurried, each one a small and complete surrender.

It seemed right that she had chosen this season. She had always known how to let go of things gracefully.

The forest was quieter after that. Not empty — the walking world kept moving through, as it always had. But the particular quality of being known, of having one’s knowing recognized and received — that was gone. And Asher, who had stood here for four hundred years and would likely stand for four hundred more, felt the shape of that absence the way you feel a missing tooth with your tongue. Constantly. Without meaning to.

•

The grandson came the following spring.

He was perhaps forty years old and he moved like someone who had recently run out of ways to avoid himself, which in Asher’s experience was often the beginning of something. He didn’t choose Asher’s spot deliberately — or if he did, he wasn’t ready to admit it to himself yet. He just sat down with his back against Asher’s trunk and stayed there for a long while, looking at nothing in particular, breathing slowly.

Asher felt for the thing the grandmother had carried.

It was there. Faint, the way a frequency is faint when someone hasn’t yet learned to tune to it, but unmistakably present. Like an instrument that had been well-made and then left in a corner, not played, not ruined, just waiting. His grandmother had known it was in him — Asher was certain of that. Had tended toward it in the quiet way that seers tend toward the gift in others, not pushing, just illuminating. And then she had let go in her October, and left him here, still becoming.

He came back that summer. And the one after.

He began to notice things. The way the canopy had thinned over Asher’s crown. The particular quality of stillness around the roots. He mentioned it once to his mother on the path back down, and Asher watched her do what the walking world so often does with the things it cannot yet see — she kept moving, said something reassuring, filed it somewhere she would not return to.

He said it again the following year, to a forester who came to survey the property. The forester made a note and moved on.

He did not push. He did not insist. He sat with it the way his grandmother had sat with things — not because he had fully learned that yet, but because something in him was remembering it. Something she had left in him before October came for her.

Asher watched him and felt something that wasn’t quite hope and wasn’t quite grief but lived quietly in the space between them.

•

The emerald ash borer arrived the way most devastating things arrive — invisibly, and then all at once.

By the time the damage was visible enough for everyone to agree it was real — the thinning crown, the desperate sprouts pushing up from the base, the particular exhaustion of a tree beginning its goodbye — the grandson was standing at Asher’s roots with his mother beside him.

“I had no idea,” she said.

He said nothing. Asher felt him hold something complicated in his chest — not triumph, not bitterness, not even quite grief. Something that doesn’t have a clean name. The specific weight of having seen a thing, said a thing, watched the thing arrive anyway, and still being expected to absorb the “I had no idea” as though the idea had never been offered.

He put his hand against Asher’s bark.

And Asher felt it — the quality of his touch, the weight of his attention — and recognized it completely. It was his grandmother’s hand. Not the same hand, but the same presence. The same willingness to make contact with what is real rather than what is comfortable.

He was becoming. Slowly, in his own season, in the way that things become when they’ve been well-rooted by someone who loved them and then left them to find their own way toward light.

He wasn’t there yet. But he was closer than he knew.

•

Asher had a companion on the south-facing side — a moss-covered boulder, dark, flecked with lichen and quartz, old beyond reckoning, who had witnessed everything with the specific serenity of something that has never once been asked to explain itself.

Asher told the boulder about it that evening, in the slow way that ancient rooted things communicate, which is without hurry and without expectation of response.

The boulder, as was its nature, said nothing.

But it was there. It had always been there. And sometimes that is the whole of what you need — not to be believed in the moment, not to be thanked after the fact, not to be vindicated when the thing you saw finally arrives. Just to have one true and steady thing beside you that has never required you to prove what you already know.

The seeing is not the burden.

The loneliness of seeing is the burden. The long years of offering what you know and watching it go unreceived. The specific exhaustion of being walked past by people who will return later, shaking their heads, saying “I had no idea” — and being expected to hold that gracefully.

And the grace, if there is grace to be found, is not in needing others to finally understand. It is in learning, over a very long time, to trust the thing that sees. To let it be what it is without requiring it to be welcomed. To stand rooted in your knowing the way Asher stood rooted — not because it was easy, but because it was true. And because somewhere out there, even if you have to wait decades, even if you have to wait until October takes them and leaves the seed of them behind in someone younger — somewhere out there is someone who will press their palm against you and feel exactly what you mean.

Asher had been doing this for four hundred years.

It didn’t get easier, exactly.

But it did get quieter.

And in the quiet, there was something that felt, if not like peace, then at least like the deep and unhurried confidence of a tree that has survived every winter it has ever been given.

So far.

~ ~ ~

A note from me:

Claircognizance is the quietest of the gifts and often the loneliest. It doesn’t announce itself with images or sounds or sensations in the body. It simply arrives — whole, source less, certain. You know something. You cannot say how you know it. And in a world that trusts what can be explained and sourced and verified, this kind of knowing is the one most likely to be walked past before it can be received.

The wound of this gift is specific. It is not the knowing itself that hurts. The knowing is simply true — it neither needs nor asks for company. What hurts is the offering. The moment you say what you see and watch the room keep moving. The years of being walked past. And then the harder moment still — when what you knew finally arrives, fully and undeniably, and the people who walked past it say “I had no idea” and mean it completely, and you are expected to hold that gracefully as though the idea was never offered.

There is no clean name for what that feels like. It lives somewhere between grief and the absence of surprise. It is one of the lonelier places a human being can occupy.

What rarely gets said is this: the knowing was never about being right. The ones who carry claircognizance most fully are almost never invested in being right. They are invested in the offering — in making the information available to whoever needs it, in doing the work of sight without attachment to whether it is received. The wound is not wounded pride. It is the ache of an offering that went unmet. Those are very different things, and confusing them is one of the ways we fail the people who carry this gift.

If you carry this gift: the loneliness is real and you are not imagining it and it does not mean the knowing is wrong. What Asher found — not quickly, not without cost — was the particular quiet that comes when you stop needing the seeing to be welcomed and simply let it be what it is. A true thing. Yours. Offered freely. Complete whether or not it is received. Find your boulder — the one steady presence that has never required you to prove what you already know. You need at least one of those. We all do.

If you love someone who carries this gift: they are not trying to be right. They are telling you what they see. Slow down enough to receive it — not because they need validation, but because some things, once you’ve walked past them, you cannot walk back to. And when the thing they named finally arrives, do not say “I had no idea.” Say instead: you told me. I wasn’t ready to hear it. I hear it now. That small acknowledgment is not nothing. It is, in fact, everything.

In the Green Mountain forest at Alpenglow there is an ash tree who has been knowing things for three or four hundred years. He grew diagonal before he grew straight — which tells you something about what he survived to get here. He has a moss-covered boulder companion on his south side, dark, flecked with lichen and quartz. And he is being threatened by the emerald ash borer, a small green beetle that kills from the inside out, invisibly, until one day it isn’t invisible anymore.

He knew it was coming.

He always knows.

~ ~ ~

Somewhere beneath him, the mycelium felt it too.

With love and a little bark,

Lexy

What came through that conversation surprised me. Not leadership frameworks. Not coaching tools. Fables.

Eight of them. Each one grown from a living being on this land — an ancient ash tree, a brook that carries every voice but its own, a mycelium network that loved too completely. Each one written for a specific kind of person. The kind who knows things they can’t explain. Who feels rooms before they enter them. Who has spent significant portions of their life being walked past by a world moving too fast to receive what they were offering.

If that’s you, this is for you.

Fables from Alpenglow Meadows is a completed collection of eight illustrated literary fables, each one pairing one of the eight clairsensory gifts — the Clairs — with a being on this Vermont land. It is the most complete thing I have ever made. It came through a clean channel.

And it came now. I don’t think that’s an accident. We are in a moment of collective awakening to the gifts so many of us were taught to distrust or hide. The world is asking for a different kind of knowing. This book arrived in answer to that asking. Not as instruction. Not as explanation. As a place to be seen.

Over the next eight weeks I’m going to release one fable at a time, here, for paid subscribers. One per week. Enough space between each one to let it settle.

I have spent my life creating safe places for souls to show up.

This is the most complete one I’ve ever built.

I hope you’ll come in.

With deep gratitude, Lexy

Rory Duff left his body two days ago, January 11th, 2026 - a portal date, 1/11, which feels exactly right for a man who spent his life teaching us to recognize divine timing and follow synchronicity with wonder.

I met Rory through his work as a geobiologist - someone who studied how the Earth affects Life with such devotion it became prayer. He started as a gold miner in Africa, trained as a geologist, and spent over 30 years mapping what most people walk right over without ever feeling: earth energies, ley lines, sacred sites humming with frequencies we’ve forgotten how to hear. He discovered and mapped the six largest planetary energy lines - the Emperor Dragons - bringing scientific rigor to dowsing while never, ever negating the mystical. Like the greatest scientist-mystics, he showed us that consciousness and frequency are the same conversation, that science and spirit meet at the bedrock of reality, that we don’t have to choose between knowing and feeling.

But Rory was so much more than a cartographer of invisible energies. He was a teacher who helped people prepare for the evolution of consciousness he saw happening all around us - not as distant theory but as immediate, urgent invitation. Through his Sacred Path modules, he guided small groups through Jung and Steiner, through symbols and collective meditation, helping us experience unity and individuality held simultaneously in our bodies, not just our minds. For nearly two years, I studied with him in a small group where we worked through Jung’s Red Book - not as academic exercise but as lived practice, as descent and return, as transformation. He helped me trust myself and what I was receiving. That’s the mark of a true teacher, the kind that changes you: not making you dependent on his interpretations, but strengthening your own channel until you can stand in your own authority.

I got to meet Rory in person on a trip to England with my daughter in November 2024, the weekend before he fell very ill. He was so tall and so gentle - towering in stature but soft in presence. He made me dowsing rods from coat hangers with such care and excitement, fashioning them right there like a gift made in real time. They were perfectly humble tools for someone who understood that connection matters infinitely more than the instrument, that a coat hanger bent with intention carries as much magic as anything you could buy. We shared tea and crumpets at a local Bath cafe, the kind of unhurried afternoon that becomes sacred just by being fully present to it. We sat in Bath Abbey together, holding hands, praying for him and humanity, our prayers rising into those soaring Gothic arches. He wanted to hear about the elementals I work with here in Vermont - he didn’t just tolerate this conversation, he leaned in with genuine curiosity and recognition. And he was excited, truly excited, about my calling to Costa Rica, about the work I would do there with the energy lines he had mapped.

Together, we moved an energy node here at my Vermont property by the brook - a place we call Meraki, meaning to do something with soul, creativity and love, leaving a piece of yourself in your work. He left a piece of himself there with us. I can feel it still.

When Costa Rica started calling me so loudly I couldn’t forget it anymore, I was nervous to tell anyone. Why would I leave Vermont when I’m so close to this land, when I’ve worked so hard to build something here? When I finally told Rory about this calling, he sat back in his chair on our video call, smiled this huge, knowing smile, and simply said “Yes.” Then he kept smiling. He didn’t need me to justify it or make sense of it or prove it was the right choice. He understood what I was learning to understand: when synchronicity gets that loud, you follow. That’s the path. That’s how consciousness evolution works. His yes was permission and blessing and recognition all at once.

Rory was in his own evolution from what I call “bridge work” to “column work” when we met - moving from translating invisible energies into frameworks others could understand, to being pure frequency transmission himself. He had spent decades building bridges so others could cross, and now he was becoming the column, the direct transmission, the thing itself. He gathered people at sacred sites for group meditation because he knew the veils between worlds were thinning. He lived by synchronicity for over a decade, letting it guide his extraordinary discoveries and his profoundly generous teaching. He trusted it completely.

The invisible has lost one of its finest map makers. But Rory knew what he taught: nothing dies, energy just transforms. He’s already working from pure frequency now, no longer limited by a body, ready to work with all of us on the energy lines he spent his lifetime mapping with such love and precision.

If you want to learn more about this amazing man and teacher you can visit his website and read his fascinating work. if you curiosity is peeked I highly recommend you locate a node/leyline near you and meditate there. Pray there. Trust what you receive. Follow the synchronicities wherever they lead you. I can personally attest to the power and flow that enters you life when you do.

Thank you, Rory, for your gentle wisdom, your towering presence, your huge smile, and for saying yes when I needed to hear it most. I’ll carry those coat hanger dowsing rods with me to Costa Rica. You’ll be there with me on those mountains, working the lines together. I feel you already.

With reverence and love, Lexy

That’s when the orb appeared.

It was turquoise-green, or green-turquoise - the color shifted like water. Not scary, not overwhelming. It came to play. And in that playful connection, it shared something profound: Nothing dies. Energy just transforms.

I GOT it. Not intellectually - I was nine. But in my bones, in my cells, I understood. Energy gathering into form, expressing itself, then releasing itself to transform into something new. This was how everything worked - babies, puppies, all of life cycling through forms.

I ran inside, bursting with this revelation. “I know how babies are born!” I announced to my parents. “It’s energy coming together, and when that life completes, the energy transforms and can become something new!”

They shut me down. Not cruelly - they were loving parents. But to them, their nine-year-old was talking gibberish about babies. “No, no, that’s not how it works. Nothing for you to worry about.”

Here’s where the story really begins I made meaning from that shutdown. I decided my direct knowing, my communion with that light being, was incorrect. That I had misunderstood.

And I spent the next forty-plus years translating what I directly perceive into frameworks others can accept.

StrengthsFinder. Leadership models. Graceful conversations. Always building bridges between the truth that light shared - that everything is energy in transformation - and systems built on the illusion of permanence and control.

I became fluent in corporate speak. Learned to wrap cosmic truth in business cases. Developed programs that sneak unity consciousness into boardrooms through “practical” leadership tools.

But here’s what I’m learning: That orb didn’t come through trauma or crisis. It came through play. Through joy. Grace found me in delight, not struggle.

And now, as I am preparing for my own transformation - selling our Vermont property, moving to Costa Rica’s mountains - I’m finally ready to speak directly from that knowing again. To trust that those meant to hear don’t need the translation.

Because that nine-year-old wasn’t wrong. She was shown the fundamental truth of existence: We are all energy, temporarily borrowing these forms, here to transform ourselves and each other through the alchemy of connection.

The corporate world needs leaders who remember this. Who can hold the truth that nothing is permanent, everything transforms, and grace is always available - especially in systems built on fear.

That turquoise light is still with me. It’s in every Graceful Leadership session; every moment I help an executive see beyond their fear-based patterns. It’s in the work of remembering that we’re not fixing broken systems - we’re helping energy transform into its next expression. In reflection it is also the color of the cover of my book, The Power of Graceful Leadership. I am smiling at this inner awareness that did not exist until I wrote this post. This confirms that perspective is everything, a slight shift allowed me to see what all the time has been there.

The seal is breaking. The direct knowing is returning. And I’m finally ready to trust what that nine-year-old knew:

The light comes to those who play.

What childhood knowing have you sealed away to fit into systems that couldn’t hold your truth? I’d love to hear your stories.

You will meet other amazing souls where you can learn, share, and enjoy a peaceful way of interacting with yourself through community. Times are confusing, exciting, sad, and joy filled right, now. So many emotions moving through us so quickly and it can be frustrating to say the least. This invitation to go within will help you build or deepen your own foundation, so that no matter what comes you know your way.

So, if you are feeling brave and are ready to join us here is how.

1. Send me a note with the email address you would like added to the zoom invite

2. Order your workbook

3. Head over to the Gene Keys website and complete your profile. It is free. Print a copy and keep it with your journal. It is helpful for you to read or listen to your activation keys prior to coming together. The workbook will show you how and where to grab those resources. You will find a lot of good information on your profile page as well.

   NOTE: This body of work is not simply astrology so if that pops up for you let it go and come with an open heart and mind.