Heartwood: The Wisdom and Healing Kinship of Trees

Emmy‑nominated filmmaker and University of Cambridge Environmental Psychologist Lindsay Branham invites readers into an embodied, reciprocal relationship with trees to heal our severed connections to ourselves and the earth, returning home to the living world.

In the midst of the California wildfire season, Lindsay Branham was besieged by unexplainable health symptoms. Her descent into chronic illness challenged her notion of Western frameworks of “healing,” compounded alongside rapid ecological loss. Through a catalytic love affair with a family of trees in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado, an odyssey of healing unfolds—a poetic evocation to love the Earth, and to be loved back. What if human and planetary health is connected? What if healing is an embodied ecological process, not an outcome? What if trees are our guides to connection?

Through the intertwining rings of science and spirit, this is the story of how Lindsay was summoned by trees, brought together to share their enduring wisdom—we each belong to this world, and it’s up to us to protect the whole of it. Heartwood conjures an invitation to go on a journey with trees; from strangers to kin because, as Lindsay lays out in detail, everything belongs, and trees in all their sentinel, entangled, alchemical generosity embody that kinship, defy domination and can help us both repair a lost relationship with the Earth and learn to embody mutuality, collectivity and care for the forest. Combining scientific research from her PhD studies at Cambridge on interoceptive awareness, our body’s “eighth sense,” which she suggests is the sensuous language of the Earth, readers will be walked through a step‑by‑step wonder-filled process of creating an intimate and reciprocal relationship with the more than human world, while learning why remembering our birthright of belonging to nature is a central antidote to mitigating climate collapse.
 
This tender, lyrical work explores concepts such as eco‑grief, reciprocity as life force, the pace of place, erotic ecology, attachment healing with nature, composting suffering, entangled futures, loving inter-species kinship and death doulaship. Heartwood speaks directly to what is the missing piece at the heart of the unfolding environmental mega-crisis: the fact that our dissatisfaction, discontent and despair are core symptoms of being separated from nature and shares exactly how to rediscover the medicine that is right under our feet.