07/01/2025
🌿 Welcoming Renee Callowey, Our New Resident Writer 🌿
At Unbound Healing, we believe stories can be medicine.
That’s why we’re honored to welcome Renee Callowey as our new Resident Writer.
Renee writes at the intersection of spirituality, emotional honesty, and embodied healing. Her work explores themes like trauma, nature, belonging, and the slow, often nonlinear path to healing. Through personal storytelling and reflective nonfiction, she gives voice to the quiet spaces many of us carry but rarely name.
Each week, she’ll share a new piece that reflects Unbound Healing’s mission: to help others reconnect with what’s real, rooted, and restorative.
Her first offering, “What the Tree Remembers,” is a beautiful meditation on land, memory, and the invisible threads between grief, silence, and reverence. We couldn’t imagine a more fitting beginning.
🕊️
Welcome, Renee. We’re so glad you’re here.
—Unbound Healing
—
🌲 What The Trees Remember 🌲
I didn’t think about trees.
Not really.
Not until Marvin.
My husband and I moved into the mountains—acres of feral land that bordered a wildlife preserve. As a city girl, I was enchanted by the turkeys, foxes, deer, and bears that roamed our property. I thought I had moved into the quiet.
But it turned out the quiet was older than me.
Wiser.
Every day, I walked our land. Over time I started to feel it: the hum of life beneath my feet, the invisible exchange. It knew not only the secrets of the sparrows and the foxglove, but my own. Earth didn’t offer. It spoke:
“Your stress—
give that to me.
I’ll grow it into aster.”
On one of these walks, I met Marvin. A voice whispered, silently, “Look up”.
When I looked I was in awe. Marvin was the tallest tree in sight. He loomed over everything like a grandfather holding an umbrella.
My feet stopped moving,
frozen into the warm soil
near his roots.
In deep devotion,
my hands touched his bark
like a sacrament—
an electric buzz pulsating
through the grooves
in his bark.
I don’t know how long I stood there, frozen.
I saw
reverence,
holiness,
glory,
shaped like leaves,
floating down to christen me—
not with water,
but with wind
and wonder.
Marvin baptized me into the sanctity of land that I thought was mine, but I realized it could never be mine. This could never even be Marvin’s. Belonging—a manmade illusion meant to capture the bluebird and believe it sings for you.
Like a breeze in July—
brief,
welcomed,
but we never stay.
Nothing does.
Only the land remains,
witness to the coming and going
of those who believed they belonged.
Marvin remembers the Blackfeet whispers,
and the Cherokee footsteps that sang across this land—
before the machines came.
He remembers the cave where they hid,
and how the land wept for what was done.
He remembers when the night sky wasn’t broken by floodlights.
He remembers silence—
not chainsaws.
Marvin remained through it all,
a silent witness to the winds of change.
A testament to time.
To the people
To industry.
And that day—to me.
Now, I think about trees.
I think about Marvin.
After the last storm
I wonder if he is still standing.
I hope he is.
I hope he remembers
the way my hand rested on his bark.
That I stayed.
That I listened.
Now,
when I pass a tree,
I pause.
I look up.
I listen.
And I remember.
Now,
I think about trees.
—
If this piece moved you, consider offering a “Cup of Courage” or helping us “Keep the Lights On.” Every gift supports the sacred labor of reflection, writing, and healing offered through Unbound Healing. https://donorbox.org/renee-callowey
