Alone in the woods... with my thoughts.
Sometimes I like to do "stream of consciousness" exercises. I often write these down, and over the years I have amassed quite collection of notebooks full of disconnected pages with no direction or format. Some share themes, others share forms, but there is very little that would connect them, other than the days of my life. The pages of my story. I find that it is easier to access a place that holds that stream of consciousness if I am alone, and the world is quite- like when I am in the woods.
There are plenty of stories here in the woods. Each tree has a tale to tell, a lifetime of knowledge trapped in the rings of it's growth. From it's birth to the time it falls, most of the time, up here, that's a good while after it's death. Most of the trees in this area don't ever get logged because the slopes they grow on are too steep. So they stand long after they have expired, at least until the wind takes them. Some of the tallest have seen a couple centuries of our history. Some, have been here since before Lewis and Clark made thier way over the Rockies.
There are very few of the old growth trees left up here, instead, there is a whole new generation of trees with new stories to tell. The old ones keep their secrets, and I try to make sure that they stay standing until they can't stand any more.
There are times, especially in the fall and the spring, when I wonder off into the woods wanting to listen to the sound of the world, what it sounded like before we were all here. Before our made up merry-go-round of bullshit started making it's noise in the middle of mother natures garden.
I don't know of a single thing in nature that denies it's world in favor of imagining a place it fits better in. When I think about the world humans created, I am reminded that we are such insecure creatures.
There is a silence here in the woods that makes me smile, it tells me that it doesn't care what we think. We are and always will belong to it, no matter how many sky scrapers we build or how many walls we put between us and this rugged land. No matter how we tell ourselves that we "transcended" the shadows of the forests. We are just pretenders, nothing more. At least the trees know where they stand, and they never told themselves that they were better than the dirt, the rocks, or the other plants. We like to think we are better, but in truth, we are just running from the darkness.
The trees know it, the animals know it, the little bees and insects know it. Every living thing knows it. Even the land knows it. Our disease is one of denial and it will always leave us feeling incomplete, because denial is how we hide the parts of us we don't like. Those parts that can only be heard in the silence of nature, in those places where each footfall is a reminder that, everything is food for something else. This thought is both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. In many ways, it's why me and the wife moved back to the woods in the first place- to reconnect with truth.
Here, at least we know when to "fight", when to "flight", when to "freeze" and when to "fawn". Our reflexes are driven by something we didn't create to cover up the truth. That thing that hides under the sound of traffic, way down in the cracks of the pavement and beneath the sewer lines. What burrows in the soil down there? Behind the murmuring dissonance of unhappy creatures who have forgotten the sound of running water and crickets.
Up here, when the lights are out, they are are truly out and it is only in that kind of darkness, in that kind of night, that we can see the magic in the stars and the vastness of the ocean they slumber in- despite how scary it can get. And, much like the trees, the stars also have stories, some so old and so far away that we can only hear their echo's millions of years after they have spoken. Each one is unique and each one is part of a larger story which is also part of an even bigger story and so on... ad nauseam infinito.
It's a reminder that no matter how deluded we become, we still belong to something we can't fully grasp, understand, or erase and it is there that we can find truth even if it takes sorting through the layers to get back to it.
Cheers!
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