It was wet, the grass, after several dismal days of rain, and I was sat among the graves sticking up like decaying teeth from furry gums, staring over at an old yew tree with my notebook balanced on my crossed legs. I was wearing fishnets under my Puma shorts because I was heading out to a party after my trip to meet the oldest tree in London, and in glancing down at my legs caught in fishnets I imagined how far away I must seem from the look of a serious nature or ecological or botanical writer like Robert Macfarlane or Annie Dillard or Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Recently I had started questioning my skepticism towards any ritualized practices that attempt to counteract how detached we have all become from the nonhuman world, like anyone who actually performed the memefied pursuit of “touching grass,” or who goes out once a day to press their hands against the trunks of trees, and in that way make contact with the quiet, ancient beings that line our streets and punctuate our parks and make our air breathable. So, I decided to try something similar, marking out a whole morning (it was supposed to be a whole day, but there always seems to be so much else more pressing than hanging out with a tree), for getting up close and personal with the Totteridge Yew, which stands in a churchyard at the northern fringe of the UK’s capital city.

The Totteridge Yew is somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 years old—once yews pass 250 years, it becomes harder to tell their age since all sorts of unusual things start happening to their growth rate. Like a much-annotated draft of a manuscript, new trunks spring forth and meld with the old trunk, making it difficult to determine the number of annual rings. This yew has witnessed hundreds of generations of humans pass through and out of the world. It might have been around for a portion of pre-Christian Britain, when trees were still venerated, and groves were sacred sites where important communal assemblies were held. In the Celtic and Druidic traditions, at least, certain estimable trees were thought to be deeply connected to or the dwelling places of all kinds of gods and heroes. After my visit to the oldest tree in London, I started collecting these stories of gods and heroes’ encounters with trees from Celtic mythology. One of my favorites is from the Fenian Cycle, in which the mythical hero Finn (supposed to have lived in Ireland in the third century CE, when the Totteridge Yew across the sea might have been in its early infancy, long before the people here began their attempts to invade and suppress their closest neighboring land) comes across the enigmatic Man in the Tree, a being from another world. The Man in the Tree is really a tree whose head and features were human-shaped, like an Ent, perhaps, and on whose shoulder perched a blackbird and in whose left-hand there was a bronze vessel filled with water in which a trout swam and from which the Man in the Tree drank and which he shared with the blackbird and a nearby stag, too.

Another favorite is the romance of Baile and Aillinn, a folktale that shares a similar narrative structure to the tragic tale of Romeo and Juliet. Two young people with their whole lives ahead of them, Baile and Aillinn fall in love by means of exchanged poems and letters, without ever having met. The Wee Folk (the collective term for a variety of small supernatural beings found in Irish folk mythology) are so jealous of their love that they confect a plan to ensure their love will never be fulfilled. On their way to meeting, the Wee Folk convince each lover that their beloved has suddenly passed away, which of course leads them both to die of broken hearts. Where Aillinn is buried there grew a tall apple tree. Where Baile is buried there grew up a great yew tree. After seven years, the top of both trees began to resemble the lovers’ heads.

It’s what I wanted at the time: for something strange and maybe human-formed to emerge out of the top of the Totteridge Yew so that I might relate to it as I do a person, rather than being forced to discover the appropriate way to get to know a tree. I imagined, on my arrival, pressing my hand against the tree which has seen the most history—and mystery, and heartbreak, and grief, and cycles of life and destruction—in this city and, that somehow, all that life might be transmitted through its reddish bark to me, which would then show up in what I write.

Except I never pressed my palm to the Totteridge Yew. “Every part of the yew but the berry is highly poisonous,” warned a library book I’d brought to the churchyard, The Yew-Trees of Great Britain and Ireland, by the physician and botany-enthusiast John Lowe, published in 1896 and written with far more energy and personality than a book about the history of yew trees realistically requires. And so, I had to find another method.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, opens her wildly successful second book, Braiding Sweetgrass, with an anecdote gleaned from teaching third-year botany and ecology students. When she asked them to offer up any examples of positive interactions between man and the natural world, they collectively drew blanks. All they knew was our capacity to provoke destruction and ruination in the natural landscape. “How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?” she asks.

To bridge this gap, in Braiding Sweetgrass Wall Kimmerer draws on her indigenous heritage, including Potowatomi founding stories, beliefs, and practical knowledge of the natural world, to illuminate for her students and readers the positive, symbiotic relationships that can be found between humans and nature. Our relationship with the natural world is one of gift exchange, she writes, “an obligation of sorts to give, to receive and to reciprocate.” By relating to the non-human species with whom we share the planet as teachers and guides, we might reawaken our ecological consciousness and so begin to protect our own futures on this planet. “In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us,” she explains. In reading that I imagine how differently I might have related to the yew tree had I visited it not in my own anemic, capitalist, and predominantly secular age, but when the yew was young and the pagan people of Britain had closer and more obviously reciprocal relationships with the natural world, telling stories about it which were imbued with wonder.

That word pagan originally referred to those living in the countryside, to rustics: paganus in classical Latin. The spread of Christianity across the Roman Empire took place mostly in towns and cities. In rural villages and hamlets, the old beliefs were sustained for far longer, the people worshipping and communing with a panoply of gods and mythical figures who had particular ties to the land and the natural cycle of seasons. It had a strange effect on me to discover the etymology of the word pagan. I’ve spent the last few years slowly orbiting nearer to the Christian faith, like a meteor that might one day crash right into it. Something I’ve liked about this process is the fact that engaging with Christianity makes me feel like I am being slowly re-embedded into historical time, gaining a deeper, richer sense of the past by participating in this ancient faith. I forget, sometimes, the extent to which Christianity altered the historical course of Britain, overtaking and consuming all other beliefs that once dwelled in these lands. I wonder how much Britain’s conversion to Christianity at the end of the sixth century has contributed to how alienated I feel (and so many people feel) from the natural world. Would all possible histories and cosmologies have led us towards industrialized detachment? Is there no world where the Man in the Tree persists, where the tragedy of two lovers’ deaths is alchemized into the permanence of two pleaching trees?

The weather while I was in residence with the Totteridge Yew was broadly psychotic, with flashes of hot sunlight, then dark weeping clouds, all passing by very fast. From my position on the ground, I looked up at the yew and tried to understand it. I looked down at my notebook and tried some lines about its dark green rows of needles organized in twin ranks, how these needles were often bleached at their ends like frosted tips. I looked up at the yew, wondering how to express anything of its structure and form in words. I looked down at my notebook and tried some lines about how it appeared as if two enormous arms had reached out from the sky and tried to crack the yew in half. From the midst of its damaged and almost-split original bole—out of which grew a mess of hollow and holed branches deranged by knots and tumors and burls—rose a far younger, thinner shoot, heading skywards while its more gnarly siblings reached out horizontally, as if too tired to climb towards the sun.

That jerky motion, my gaze shifting continually between the white page and the real thing, reminded me of life drawing classes I took as a kid, how disorienting it had been to stare across at the forever-unfinished running lines of the human body and think, Ok, I get what’s going on here, but then fail to create any kind of likeness in graphite. A similar motion dictates the relationship between my writing and my actual experience of the world. I sit down to write about how I hope my life might look—describing here the importance of ritual, there of community, or the sacred—but when I look up to try and get a measure of what’s actually going on in my life, those features are always background, threatening to fade out altogether.  The same thing was happening now: the distracted hour I had managed so far, with my iPhone balanced atop my notebook in case I fell too deeply into thought, was a pale vision of my desire to spend dawn to dusk with an ancient yew tree.

Wall Kimmerer suggests that her research methods are not dissimilar to an interview. She interviews the moss, the sweetgrass, the serviceberry, by carefully getting to know these species over long periods of time. I spend much of my working life conducting interviews with people. If this was an interview, I had barely gotten beyond my preliminary questions to the yew.

And so, I got up and walked backwards until I could survey the whole tree at once from root to crown. What I realized then is that it is a ridiculous sort of tree, its character faintly lunatic, all those branches pointing out in different directions under a shaggy coat, a kind of manginess to its self-presentation. As Wordsworth would have it: “Huge trunks!—and each particular trunk a growth / Of intertwisted fibers serpentine / Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved,— / Nor uninformed with Fantasy, and looks / That threaten the profane.”

I tried another approach: walking slowly clockwise around the base of the yew several times, trying to know it three-dimensionally. The bark in the cracked-open center of the tree looks almost liquid in form; it spreads like a protective skin over the places where its hundred branches are broken or split open. The word for this process is cicatrize, my yew book had told me. Yews are excellent at regeneration, forming scars over their old wounds which make them look even more like patchwork Frankenstein’s monsters. A crow flew through the branches and settled in its embattled center. I thought about the gifts they might exchange: a non-poisonous berry for the chance of a brand-new crop of yews.

I finished my laps and sat down again under the yew, among the graves, and continued with my yew book. Lowe includes a list of epithets recorded in Old English onwards applied to the yew. Almost all of these are related to sorrow or death: “melancholy, funereal, mourner, black, dark, sable, stubborn, sullen, tough, shooter, distinguished, pensive, mortifère, forceful, ductile. Warlike, dismal, fatal, mortal, venomous, unhappy, verdant, deadly, deathful.” The deathful, sullen yew; I liked it more with every fact I learned about it. The Weird Sisters in Macbeth make their terrible potions with “slips of yew/ slivered in the moon’s eclipse.” In Richard II it earns the epithet “double-fatal yew,” double because of its poisonous effects and because its supple bark had been turned since the earliest times into bows for battles. Shooter yew. Warlike yew. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the way to Tartarus, the darkest and deepest part of the underworld, is lined with yews. In England, yews are often found in churchyards; they are happiest among those no longer living. Lowe, my yew enthusiast, writes that no one knows for certain why yews are grown alongside graves. Maybe it is because they are so poisonous, and therefore naturally linked with sinister matters, that they make such an appropriate bedfellow for the dead, or because a tree so linked to death might be good for directing dead souls on to wherever they must go. It might be because yews are evergreen and have regenerative properties which mean that, even when a yew appears on the verge of death, a new shoot might right then be waiting to burst out of its bark or shallow roots and make its way towards the light. O complex, mixed-message yew: a harbinger of eternal life or final death?

On my phone under the yew tree’s needle cover, I read that in the 1990s scientists found in the bark of the Pacific yew a compound they called paclitaxel, which is now commonly used in chemotherapy medication. It can be synthesized in a lab, but initially, every yew tree from which paclitaxel was harvested was also killed in the process. A life for a life. Wall Kimmerer writes that the natural world offers us all kinds of gifts which we are then duty-bound to return, somehow.

A month after my date with the Totteridge Yew I was hanging out with a new friend who has spent a lot of time interviewing modern pagans. She said something that caused me to reappraise my conception of paganism, and how I relate to the natural world as something animate and mysterious. Pagans still wrestle with their faith, she told me. As we so often assume with believers of other faiths, I assumed that pagans must have a certain, stable sort of belief system. But, of course, they have days when it feels harder to connect and commune with the natural world, when they feel out of tune, when they are governed, like any other believer, by doubts. Immediately I wanted to visit the Totteridge Yew again, to wrestle with it as Jacob once did with an angel on a hill in Palestine. The natural world can offer us gifts, but no one said it would be an easy thing to get to a point where we might have earned them. We have grown out of tune. We have made ourselves unmovable. Or that’s how I have felt for much of my life. Until recently, perhaps.