We Have Carved a Space for Ourselves Between the Trees

I sought out a reunion with the woods, where I felt my secrets were best kept. I roamed without direction, but also without fear; wherever I went I knew the forest would cradle me as best it could. Every step was a comfort, and every breath a secret between me and the trees.

Light spilt upon one tree in particular - a sentinel; a witness to every thought, a keeper of every whisper. It loomed over a crossroads etched into the dirt, instinctively knowing each route but never where the individual choice led. I pitied it only for a moment, until I recognised my own independence - and that the tree who could recall the start of each path would be blessed to meet so many passing it by. I hoped those travellers occasionally returned to tell stories of where they had been led so that the tree might better know the directions in which its roots sprawled.

I watched a stream move the dirt aside to flow from the mountaintop and I realised that being like water doesn't always simply mean adapting and moving with the current; it can mean cutting a path through the landscape to ensure you reach wherever you're drawn to, regardless of how long it might take to erode the rocks or soften the earth. Patience lives in every drop of water. It can wait a millennia while still moving forward.

I greeted a fallen trunk as an old friend would and rested upon it. I took off my headphones so that we might be alone together in the music of trees. But as the violins faded, a greater, more softening - and humbling - symphony rose up. Above us, the wind jostled the highest branches as the rain tumbled down. I glanced up and watched as the swaying trees moved to shelter us. How, I wondered, was it possible for the rain to be kept at bay and still the moss was growing underfoot, tangled with ivy and teaming with life? It wasn't for me to know the forest's business, and so I returned to my own.

My first instinct was to lean against the trunk, my hands splayed and arms locked. It bounced beneath me. As a toddler would, I tested the boundaries of its strength before turning to lean my back against it. It wavered but it did not fall, and I knew that the felled trunk - supported by another - had me. I was safe here. I could lean and not fall; I could dangle above the Earth and know I would not come to harm. It could hold my weight and my worries and take them gratefully from me, tucking them out of sight. It was a grandparent, eager for a visit, heart heavy at being remembered, knowing a time would come when they would be forgotten again. There was no greater, more reassuring feeling in the whole world - even as the rain reached me in speckled droplets.

For a moment, I wondered if I could live there - live in the forest - only to look up and see eyes etched into all the trunks surrounding me. They were the eyes of those who cared, of those rooted so firmly in place that they relied on me to take flight and bring them back stories of the world beyond their bark-clad chains. I knew that they didn't want me to stay, but would always welcome me back, for if I was to stay, I could not be rooted; unlike the trees, I cannot gather all I need from the forest floor.

The realisation that I would need to part with the forest surfaced a great anxiety in me. I was being ousted from Eden, pushed from the nest, banished - until, at least, I next needed the forest.

The rain was falling. Still, I could afford to take the long way out and follow the meanders pressed into the moss by other more careless wanderers. Their carelessness paved a way for me. And maybe the mistakes of others are a chance for me to learn; and maybe they were never mistakes at all, but wanderings without direction - attempts to find the way without a map or a path or sight of the horizon through the trees.

At least I had the advantage of stepping into the woods and of seeing the routes taken by others, so that I might have the choice to follow them, to strive on ahead along the trail, or to beat my own path into the dirt.

Whatever I chose, I knew at least that there was one certainty: I could not repair where other people had trodden - I did not have enough footprints or will, but nor did I need to. There was plenty of space to weave between the trees on my way to somewhere else - somewhere more peaceful.

Unlike those paths, I felt myself heal a little at the thought.

I took my time leaving, bathed in greenery and leading a parade through the forest. I reached for different trunks to feel them - smooth, wrinkled, riveting - upon my palms, as if greeting a crowd who wished me well and cheered me to the boundaries. There are, after all, no exits to the forest; the forest is forever, and we have merely carved a place for ourselves between the trees.