This is me trying to have a sacred encounter with the 2,000-year-old small-leaved lime coppice at Westonbirt Arboretum. Because of my terrible hunched posture I’m always looking for an opportunity to lie down and alleviate the pain in my back. Because of my great love of trees I am always looking for an opportunity to lie down in a woodland. And because we lost a beloved cousin tragically young this summer, I was also looking for opportunities to be quiet and think of him and have a little cry. This was my moment.

We recently welcomed a puppy to our family, and he has taken a special liking to me because I’m the person who walks him and feeds him; I’m not really a dog person, so he’s made it his personal mission to convert me. I guess it’s working, I love him in a sort of gently revelatory, deeply trying, must-learn-to-be-patient way. He joined me in the ancient green cavern, whining. I don’t like to have my face licked when I’m having a reflective moment. His name is Happy, so if you were passing the lime coppice you would have heard me saying, “No Happy. Fuck’s sake, Happy. Happy, please leave me alone for two seconds.”

This photograph shows the moment my youngest son came into the coppice to try to coax him out. Happy is so baffled. I suppose he’s wondering why I’m on the ground.

I am wearing Vivobarefoot shoes and white socks, a deadly sexy look I think you’ll agree, and my wife and other sons are calling, “HAPPY, HAPPY” and one of them is reading me the sign about the 20-year coppicing cycle and the blend of traditional and modern forestry techniques, and one of them is asking when precisely I pre-ordered Fifa 23 and when might it arrive, and I can feel that the water bottle is leaking in my rucksack so my makeshift pillow is becoming wet and the light is so extraordinarily beautiful coming through the neon green of the lime leaves. It is pretty humbling that this same thing has been living here in this spot for two millennia and humans have collaborated with it to help it adapt and survive, so I get my phone out to take a picture, but my phone is full of thousands of pictures of trees, and the better photo is my son, patiently imploring Happy to leave me alone, leave me be, let me have my two minutes alone, so I take this photo and then another son comes in and asks me to join in the argument about whether they can have fizzy drinks at the cafe, and I like the idea that this tree has overheard 2,000 years of very mundane human chat and it reminds me of Amitav Ghosh’s observation that “on a different timescale it might appear evident that trees are gardening humans”.

Then the dog and a child help me up, and on we go.

• Max Porter’s new novel, Shy, is out next year