Thursday, September 15, 2011

My story of the woods

The story is a simple one. I bought a piece of this planet’s rarest forest, and it brought me to my knees. It holds the promise of growth and renewal. It is a sacred space created by the heaving of the seas and the planting of seeds. It holds so much hope it makes me cry to think on it. And when I am gone, it will remain. Men come and go. I will build a house, walls, orchards. But what remains is fog dripping from redwood leaves, roaring storms of wind, and a scraping of two giant plates of earth against each other. It is the one place where I can breathe. I can place my ear on the world’s tallest tree and hear a waterfall running through it. I can move one dead branch and find a salamander as old as the primordial swamps.

Because I love this earth. I have circumnavigated it and here is where my soul rests; I lift like a fairy that dances on the wind.

I sleep under those stars. Some fall to earth, but most stay to tell their story again. When I wake there is a grey time, before the sun shines but after the black fades, when all the creatures, even the trees, hold their breath and await the dawn. They open a hole in time each morning. One day I will pull a man of earth through that hole; he will understand. I will grow in him, and he will water me. We will master windstorms. We will name the stars.