The Tree That Vanished — A Story About Trust, Land, and the Divine Feminine

I showed up at Pine Notch with a wagon full of tools I was sure I'd need. Drums. Tingsha bells. Smudge pots. Candles. Bundles of herbs. My friend pulled the cart behind me while I walked ahead, stopping at every fork in the trail like I already knew where I was going, even though I had never once set foot on that land.

I hadn't. I want to be clear about that.

Fifty acres of once-logged, deeply wounded property doesn't hand you a map. It watches you. It's trying to figure out if you're one more person who's going to show up with an agenda, take what you came for, and leave because that's exactly what happened to it, more than once. So I did what I always do when I'm standing on ground that's been hurt. I started testing.

I picked up the drum. Nothing. I tried the bells. Still nothing. I could feel that specific, unmistakable sensation of a door being held shut from the other side, not cursed, not evil, just guarded, the way anyone gets guarded after the people who were supposed to protect them didn't.

So I put the tools back in the wagon. And I sang.

The Land Doesn't Want Your Toolkit. It Wants a Piece of You.

That's the part of the story my friend still tells better than I do, because she was the one watching from the side with the cart. Watching me try instrument after instrument, come back shaking my head, and go get something else. There was a whole conversation happening that had nothing to do with words. The land was being very specific about what it did and didn't want. And what it wanted, in the end, wasn't a performance. It was me.

When I walk onto land like that, I'm not calling in deities first. Most days, it's my higher self, expressed through what I've come to call the nine Divine Feminine Archetypes. Each a facet of the whole self, each one carrying its own knowledge and its own job. At Pine Notch, I started with the Great Mother because I wanted the land to know I had come to nurture it, not to extract from it. And I want to be clear about what I mean by that, not the exhausted, self-sacrificing mother we're handed by a patriarchal script, whose worth is measured by how much she gives away. The Great Mother I called on knows her worth isn't up for negotiation. Her nurturing comes from fullness, not depletion.

Behind her came the Medicine Woman. The one who holds both the gentle healing and the aggressive kind, plant knowledge that knows which wound needs a poultice and which one needs to be lanced. And behind her, the Queen, the archetype who knows her authority so completely she never has to lord it over anything. She leads with, not over. Three archetypes, walking onto ground that had every reason not to trust a single one of them.

The drum and the bells were me performing safety. The singing was me being it. Once my actual voice, not an instrument standing in for me, started moving through that clearing, the wall came down. Not all the way. Not forever. But enough to begin.

It Boils Down to Relationship

If you ask me to reduce everything I know about working with land, plants, and spirit down to one sentence, here it is: it's relationship. Not technique. Not the right herb, the right words, the right phase of the moon. Relationship anchored in reciprocity, the oldest matriarchal law there is.

This is the same thing I tell my students about their own ingredients, and I don't say it gently, because it matters too much to soften: don't commodify what you're working with. A plant is not a supply. It's a spirit, an intelligence that predates your Pinterest board by several thousand years, and if you come to it only to extract what you want, it will know. It might even work once, twice, a handful of times. Then the blessings you were pulling will quietly dry up, and they may take a few other things with them on the way out.

None of this requires purity, and I'm careful with that word because I don't want to drag purity culture into witchcraft one more time. What it requires is authenticity. You don't need to be flawless to work with a plant, a piece of land, or your own life. You need to be honest and willing to be seen, including the parts you'd rather keep in the shadows. That's the actual work the Divine Feminine Archetypes are built to do: not to hand you a costume to perform in, but to walk you through the specific shadow work that's blocking you from an authentic relationship with whatever you're trying to heal, grow, or build. Land. Plants. A business. Yourself. It's all the same lesson wearing different clothes.

Grandpa Hemlock, and the Slow Work of Being Seen

For over a year, nobody at Pine Notch went near the back of the property if they could help it. Not because it felt evil. It just didn't feel like anywhere you wanted to linger. You'd drive out, turn around, come back. And in all that driving back and forth, past the same curve in the driveway, not one person noticed the enormous hemlock standing maybe fifty feet off the trail.

This is not a small tree. Its branches curl upward into points, like something out of a dark fantasy film, the kind of tree you'd expect to find at the center of a haunted clearing. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. And yet for over a year, we didn't see it. Not once, not on any of the dozens of trips back and forth.

We started calling this tree Grandpa Hemlock. And then, the very next time the owner tried to show it to a friend, it disappeared again. She pulled the car forward, pulled it back, and looked exactly where it was supposed to be. Nothing. He didn't appear again until later, when he was ready to be seen. We've half-joked ever since that Grandpa Hemlock has his own portal that he phases in and out on his own schedule, not ours.

I think about that tree every time someone asks me why healing work takes as long as it does. Land doesn't reveal itself on your timeline. Neither does a plant, a shadow, or a piece of yourself you've spent years keeping tucked out of sight. Some things only show themselves once they've decided you're actually staying.

Two years in, Pine Notch has birds again, actual birdsong, a background hum that wasn't there when we started, back when the loggers had taken every tree with a trunk wide enough to be worth the trip to market. The fisher cat is back. The deer are back. The wall of resistance that met me on that first walk with the wagon is still there in places, but it isn't the whole story anymore. It's just one archetype's worth of the story, the one where trust gets rebuilt slowly, through relationship, the same way it does everywhere else in life.

That's the whole premise on which the nine Divine Feminine Archetypes are built.

Whatever you're trying to heal, fifty acres of wounded forest, a client relationship, your own business, the parts of yourself you've been keeping in the shadow closet, the tools you're reaching for aren't the point. The relationship is. If you're ready to find out which archetype you need to call in first, that's exactly what my Signature Programs are built to walk you through using the same nine archetypes, mapped onto your spiritual and business journey, so you stop performing your path and start actually living it. You can explore them here: https://leandrawitchwood.com/signature-programs.