This is about craving stillness at a time when loud men go around insisting you are either chasing or being chased. This is what passes for insight around here, so I prefer silence. The other night I dreamed I was in Joyce Kilmer’s memorial forest in the Smoky Mountains, among the last contiguous old growth in these states. He who had lamented before he died, how he could only offer poems whereas trees were something else. I woke saddened to realize that the day ahead would take me elsewhere, so went on daydreaming about a future walk, in a rainforest up the coast behind the clouds, above the gray sand. I went after it in the nearest book and found the gray bark of redwood standing as the silent columns of a ruined temple; the sword ferns chest high, the air tasting of lemons. Someone is running up ahead. I am trying to hear the hermit thrush. The light here is an underwater light and the surface of this sea above this grove is in the sky and even the birds are quiet at this time. This is a leaning in. Here, years move in a circled dance. There is nowhere else to go.
Inspired by recent readings: Richard Powers’ The Overstory, Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees, and Monica Gagliano‘s research into Plant Communication.
Absolutely stunning. I wish I could visit such a place today, but the weather and events of the time make it unlikely. I’ll have to settle with travel without leaving the room. 💙
Yes, friend. How I know what you mean. The walk I am imagining may have to wait until late June, for similar reasons, but fortunately I seem to be able to wander wherever I choose to imagine for a least a few hours over Saturday morning coffee. : ) Cheers to imaginative wilds holding space for those more immersive spaces of future journeys.
Perhaps I’ll see you over our morning coffee wanders then 😊
In today’s climate the sense of need to escape, to move to another country, any other country, the nervous system in such disarray as to set the world afire with one errant spark, your writing is a soothing balm. There really is nowhere else to go. I am already all that is, already and all ways this expression of the expressionless. There is only here, only now. Where would I go? Into the nowness, the hereness, the ancient forest of imagination.
Sister, thank you for this. Love to you.