Pilgrim of the Forest

“I was walking along looking for somebody, and then suddenly I wasn’t anymore.”

Pooh

 

On another January afternoon I drove up the hill to the place where the dark moor slopes down into the forests. I stepped out of the car into air that was just a shower short of dreich. The light was grey, the air unpromising, though still. Out of such air might come a moment of absolute sublimeness, or nothing at all. I weighed up the camera bag in my hand. Sod’s Law dictated that if I took it with me, then nothing worth photographing would happen. If I left it behind, it would. I decided I would rather see something special, and not capture it, than see nothing.

Up and along the old familiar path to the crest of the hill I went. At the summit, you can look out across ten wide miles of mountain and wood. The deeply forested foothills rose in subject to the swelling of land above them, and through the dark spikes of distant pines drifted a wall of falling snow. The sun was going down behind a veil, and grey clouds were flowing around the mountains, laying out their cloaks and shrouds of snow and ice. I estimated the shower would soon reach me here, though I would be on the edge of it.

In short order it started to hail lightly. The grass and stones of the path were filled with bouncing white flecks. The mountains began to fade into the air as if they were vanishing into the otherworld, their snow dusted flanks wreathed in cloud. A cold gust sought out the edges of my collar and the back of my neck was pinging with tiny cold pellets. I did not mind. I had been cooped up indoors for too long, and it was good to feel the world touching me.

I walked down to the edge of the pine trees and looked out at the drifting curtains of hail as they swayed back and forth through the wide glen. The forest lay before me as it always did, stretching into the distance. A miasma of grey light shrouded the foot of the mountains, though at the top their edges were still sharp and clear. The high plateau seemed to float on columns of virga. Around me and upon me the hail hissed and pattered gently, as it did throughout the whole forest. It reminded me again of the rain on the loch, and the fall of the birch leaves.

From where I stood, overlooking things, I tried to send myself out to all those places I knew nearby in these beautiful woods. My feet could never carry me there so quickly as my heart. I thought of trees I knew; clearings; the river. Blades of decaying grass and soaking bogs, rotting stumps and twists of lichen. I wanted to be in all of these things and all of these places at once. If only I could command my awareness to rush out, as it had before, to feel it all. I could imagine with great accuracy and knowledge, but no, I was bound here inside myself for now. 

 

Could any mind, any heart, any consciousness touch it all? Could some spirit fill the whole forest, and be every bouncing hail stone, every twig and needle and creature? Could mine? I know what my wife would say. She would say yes, and have a name for it. But I don’t share her faith. I’m a sceptic who would love to be proven wrong, and the closest I can come to an answer is this; to stand here in the forest. To look out at all those bits of spirit or heart or soul or memory (or whatever you wish to call them) of mine that are the trees, the air, the sparkling waters, the sounds of flying geese. I have faith in them; that those things are good and right and are a match for me. There might indeed be something unseen after all, but all I can say for its nature, is that Nature is in It.

 

I have become a pilgrim of the forest, searching for its true nature. For brief moments I think I have seen it; in a drop of rain, in a cloud of fog, or a ray of sun. But the cloak is drawn swiftly back over. The silent goddess hides behind every tree.

 

Perhaps one day when I am wandering through the forest, peering into the corners, I will look around the trunk of some great pine and find her. Though, as I recall, the penalty for those who do see her true form, unclothed as it were, can be rather high. Actaeon, of Greek legend, travelled through the woods and beheld Artemis, goddess of the forest, bathing in the river. But she was not for mortal eyes, and for his crime he was transfigured into a deer, though his inner essence remained human, and torn apart by his own hounds. But maybe if, at the moment of beholding, I showed sufficient deference and humility, I could win her favour and escape such a grim fate. Maybe she would be merciful, and merely transform my body into a tree.

What would that be like, I wonder, to be myself but in tree form? To feel my clothes tear off and fall away into rags, my bare skin hardening and stretching and fissuring into hard bark. My gelatinous interior stiffening into lignin, my fingers splitting and branching and sprouting with needles. My legs snap together, they join, the bones fuse and take root even as my toes burst open with roots and hairy mychorriza. They twist and delve their way down into the musty dank dampness of the earth, and seize on rock and water. The wind and breeze pierce me but no longer chill. I learn to feel and yearn for the touch of the sun as I have never before known.

I think that to become a tree, to be a tree, would be a sensory revelation unlike anything else I can imagine. But how would it be to know I was a tree? Would my human spirit find it a prison, to be literally rooted in one spot? Would it be a trial to never walk and see the world from a different view, or would it be good, a right-thing, to know that I was in my place, and that another could never do? Would my spirit swell and fill my whole woody body at once, or could it dance along each twig and twist like a prancing squirrel? In the sun I sleep, but when it rains I reach out to my needle tips and pierce each raindrop joyfully. I think I would not feel limited and restrained in that stiff body, but joined to the universe through an infinitely fine and fringing beauty, down to the very last atom of the very last root and twig.

The world would turn, and they would come looking for me, and though they sit in my shade they would not know it was I, even as I shower them with falling needles. My voice is no more than a creak in the wind. They would wonder what had happened to me as they go about their own lives, and there I would stand. With every turn of the world I would feel (though never see) the rising and the setting of the sun, the turn of the seasons. In winter I withdraw within myself and sleep, and in spring I push out new buds and growth, expanding, always becoming. My roots fill with water, my needles catch light, and I turn these elements into fertility and fecundity. The cones that swell on branch and limb ripen and grow. The squirrels pick up, the birds tear them open, they rip pieces of me away with joy and joyful giving. And just there, beyond my shadow, the saplings of my young have taken root.

What then, if She – the Silent Goddess – seeing that I had been a good tree, came again and turned me back into a man? How strange I would feel. How limited, how small, how fleeting and frenetic. How doomed. I would wiggle my fingers at the sky, dig my toes into the earth and gaze maddeningly dazzled at the sun. But in time I would be me again. I would pick myself up, wrap myself up in my old rags and take my first faltering steps. How new and different the world seems! I step back, and the world falls back into its old familiarity. I step forward, and a new world is revealed even as the old concealed. I would walk into the world that was newly made with each forward step. And I would recall that although the journey ends, there is joy and magic on the trail.

At last, with a backward glance, I would leave. For it seems I am doomed to always leave the woods. I would ask only that when I die, you bury me there in that good soil. Some have suggested that after death we may go on to some eternal country to dwell forever. Eden, Tir Nan Og, Elysium; the ‘far green country under a swift sunrise.’ I think that if such a place does exist, then surely this is it. Let the roots find me, let the worms devour me. Let me fall apart again just as I came together, and go back to the world. Let those atoms of flesh and bone be taken up in some other form, new or old, and I hope it would be a tree.