The trees will tell you
Symbiosis
Sintra, 2024
When the world of man-made things
Of human civilization and
The separation it imposes
Feels too heavy
May you find peace in the forest
Of your dreams
Among the pines and cedar trees
Where life spills over
With poetic possibility
And the symbiotic profusion
Of a world always seeking to mend
Loose ends
Into luscious harmony
I run through the forest just moments after rainfall.
My clothes are wet but the rain is surprisingly warm for the time of year.
Thick drops make the ferns bend over in their heaviness. I’ve always been astonished by these plants and how each frond contains a smaller version of itself like Russian dolls. Ferns are fractal. And they are ancient, millions of years old. Do they remember the dinosaurs?
The mixing scent of fresh pines, moist soil, and elderflower fills the humid air. I stop for a moment and breathe. Wrapped in a dense forest like this, there are no distinct boundaries between one body and the next, no clear beginnings or endings, only messy middles, threading like twig-woven wreaths.
These are the moments of porosity. My skin becomes diaphanous: I am a bubble, holding the ecology within the translucent confines of my foamy existence. There’s no one to snap me out of it. Not here, at least. When I’m tired of the human-dominated world with its frivolous inventions, I come here to remind myself of my ecological self: of who I can be in the co-presence of the more-than-humans. The truth about porosity is that you learn to see that the world has never been yours, that feelings are not possessions you can cling to but instead move through you the way air and energy do.
Around me, I see dozens of penetrating owl eyes. Or so I think. I remember the teachings of the elders, how everything shifts shape and masquerades itself in the guise of another to fend off predators and escape hungry mouths. How the Caligo butterfly has big spots on its wings that look like the eyes of an owl, protecting itself by becoming their predators’ predator. Life, it seems, evolves that way.
