The Oak Letter
Let Yourself Be Here Too | The Quiet Oak
August 2026
Letters from an ongoing relationship wth the living world.
Before you begin reading, pause here for seventeen seconds. Listen…
There was something about this second Oak Letter that made me want to make it extraordinarily beautiful and profound.
I wanted to write this to you in such a way that you felt it. Too much focus on the result dried up my pen.
Drafting this letter was like being in an old jalopy — a very long ride, full of fits and starts, hiccups and stalling out.
Then I was reminded that I don’t need to make this letter more beautiful. I only need to tell the truth.
And so I did. This is the story of the Quiet Oak.
For Six Months this Oak Shared Nothing
On the edge of the field that is home to The Sacred Glade, an oak stands and waits. It has been doing this for a very long time. At least seven or eight centuries by my guesstimate.
This oak is big. So big that when my daughter was young, and liked hugging trees, her little arms would barely span a quarter of the trunk.
I’ve been by this oak a thousand times. Almost every walk takes me near it. It is my familiar anchor.
Seven months ago I decided to experiment — could I connect with the oaks in such a way that enabled a shared, felt experience and a communication?
Then I wasn’t sure it would be possible. Today I no longer wonder.
Because I knew this tree, it felt right to include it in my experiment. All in all, I visited five trees that day, never suspecting that my fledgling idea would turn into a massive research project that would change my life and begin to change the lives of countless others.
On that cold, grey January day, I visited five oaks. Four of them shared with me.
But this one….this one, big oak that I knew best, didn’t.
I only felt….a quietness. A stillness….A presence.
So I kept trying. Stopping again and again.
Connecting. Asking. Offering.
For six more months, this continued.
Always quiet.
Nothing shared but a sense of my belonging. A sense of being received.
There is a well of quietness that waits deep inside you.
Somewhere during those months, I changed.
The Quiet Oak’s quiet began to feel enough to me.
And then, only then, did the oak share just a little bit more:
There is a well of quietness that waits deep inside you.
It is waiting for you.
It is like a lake spreading between its shores.
The shores are the edges of your skin.
And the edges of your knowing.
They are at the edge of your seeing.
They are at the edges of everywhere that you spread your service — through your work and your love.
They are at the edge of your presence.
And your being.
Until then, I always thought of quiet as the absence of noise.
Librarians tell us not to talk.
Mobile phones are banned in the quiet train carriages.
We try to meditate to quiet our minds.
We get so busy trying to overcome the noise that we forget quiet may never have been about silence at all.
What if quiet isn’t an emptiness?
What if it is a place?
What if it is a place inside of me that I simply get to reconnect to?
Let yourself come to the shores of this lake…
It used to be that the main walking path passed right by the trunk of the Quiet Oak.
One April morning, with the fields nearly dried of the winter mud, I came across the park team lifting fallen logs into a wide circle around it. They explained that too many passing feet had compacted the soil. The logs, hopefully, would invite walkers to give the tree more space so its roots could breathe again.
This, Wendell Berry says, is How to Be a Poet.
“Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet…Breathe with unconditional breath….
Accept what comes from silence….”
The Quiet Oak offers its own invitation:
Let yourself come to the shores of this lake and sit in the breeze.
The birds have always loved sitting in the branches at the top of this oak. From that height they have a grand view over the adjacent fields in every direction.
Today, people now stop. They sit on the ring of logs that encircle this tree. Their dogs wait for them, sniffing in the grass or practicing their agility as they walk the logs like a balance beam.
I wonder…
Did the park team happen to put the logs there?
Or did the Quiet Oak inspire them to do this?
So more of us might stop long enough to be received?
To remember that we belong?
Listen to the calling of the birds.
Let yourself watch the waves gently lapping at the shores.
Listen to the calling of the birds.
Yesterday, before writing, I went out for a run that finished at the Quiet Oak.
I sat in the shade, on one of the logs, and waited.
As my heart slowed, the heavy heat lifted and my sweat faded.
“What will quiet give to me today?” I wondered.
“What wants to come through?”
My thoughts started to match the pace of my breath.
A soft wind appeared.
The tree began to move.
It’s leaves remembered the steps to an old and very gentle dance.
A yellow dog came to greet me.
As it flew overhead, a parakeet called loudly.
An older man stopped to sit on an adjacent log for a few minutes.
Another dog, this one black, came to say hello.
Groups of people passed.
I was quiet.
I started writing this letter wanting to make something beautiful.
But beauty isn’t something we make.
It’s something we become available to receive.
As I wrote this, I realised that quiet is like that too.
Maybe the practice isn’t building the lake.
The practice is walking back to its shore.
I am here with you.
I am here within you.
Let yourself be here too.
-The Quiet Oak.
What might become possible if you let yourself return to that shore today?
Listen to this letter…
Continue the conversation
If this letter stirred something in you, I'd love to meet you among the ancient oaks.
Oak Presencing Sessions are quiet, one-to-one experiences held in Windsor Great Park (or online, wherever you are in the world).