On forests & whatnot

A River Field Note from last night.

From my house at least once a day I take a trail that leads down to a creek. From there I have a mile or so of unfettered creek zone to wander, swim, sit, walk, whatever. This creek comes from a wilderness area that begins just a few miles upstream from here, and if you were to start walking north, while no direct path goes all the way, you could in theory walk all the way to Canada only crossing a couple of roads. Forests dominate this area.

Down by the creek, close to my house, not even remotely in wilderness, is a grove of trees that has something I can’t quit thinking about. It’s a spot I tend to find a lot of clarity. I visit this spot every day. I have for years. But only in the last year or so did something come to my attention that really has mesmerized my mind. There is something in this grove that brings my mind clarity. I imagine it is akin to what religious people feel when they go to an amazing church, or see a painting of their most respected elders. Or something like that.

Sometimes I don’t even realize how cluttered my mind is before I get there. Other times I know I’m thinking clearly, but something still happens, something on a different level. Something about just being around this grove trees. It’s like they are antennae extending out of the earth tying communication from the upper atmosphere and beyond. Their roots, though invisible to my eye, I can feel them beneath me, I can see them in my minds eye, extending down below the creek bed, wiring up and down in the soil, spreading out from the grove, interconnected with themselves, and with all the other trees and bushes in the area. The deer know they are there. Or so I think anyways.

I can be walking towards them and just stop, and there they are, rising like nature electricity. And it’s amazing to me, even if I’m at risk of painting myself a fool. Then something, I don’t know what, the last few weeks, maybe the freeze, they went radio silent. But last night as I walked by them, suddenly it was all alive again. There they were. Awake. Or was it just me who’d been asleep? Or maybe both?

To my mind it’s a sort of connection. It is tied to awareness but I get the sense it’s me that tunes out, not them. But then again, sometimes they seem like they are asleep. So I don’t know. But I like to think about the forest that way. It is a wildly living thing, full of individuals that move at a much different pace than we do. And while it sometimes seems near magical to me, I think it’s because I periodically slip into the right frame of mind that briefly understands it all a little better. The magic lies in knowing it’s going on all the time, even when I’m not aware.

Isn’t that the magic of Narnia? Of other worlds? Discovering that while you have gone about your day to day, year to year, minding your own business, not thinking too far out in the perimeter, you one day discover a broader world existence that has been going on behind your back. All the while… For me it’s often right in front of me. Then I wake up and see it. Clarity.

I’ve been lucky to live a life that has connected to forests in this way since as long as I have memory. Our families property in Indiana is partially wooded, partially fields. It had enough room to tramp around, which I did daily growing up. There were endless chores around the property, which especially in hindsight I love, but a lot of time was spent on just doing stuff around the property too. Play. The wooded section has a few ravines which lead down to a creek. The creek meanders beneath the hill our house was on, and lie next to an enormous wetland and field, so no other humans lived in sight of our place, except to the far sides of the two ravines. I spent a lot of times in those woods. Then as my world expanded I discovered forests elsewhere and beyond.

We often rented a cabin in the fall down in Brown County. Brown County is home to some of the most beautiful hills in Indiana. Think bridges of Madison County type of stuff. Picturesque as fuck.

I remember driving the windy roads with my brothers. They are all older. Always have been. We’d drive the winding roads listening to Radiohead and Low. Something about being in the midsts of those forests in the night. We’d pull up to a cut out overlook and just stop and take it in, a forest kind of silence, a quiet not available in any other sort of place. A clarity.

This is meandering a bit, but I’ll hone in.

Those forests were very much alive, and very beautiful, and introduced me to the broader world, but the first forest that seemed to awaken something new, a new reality, a new way of seeing all the various life and interactions within a forest was in the Wind River Range in Wyoming. There the mountains, the forests, the trees, something just connected at a deeper level. It was akin to the forest around my home in that I knew it. But I’d just arrived. I hadn’t ever been anywhere near this place, but I had a sense of seeing it more deeply, more introspectively, with a familiarity that was uncanny, and to this day indescribable. I’m not sure what I think about the idea of having lived different lives in a different plain of existence, but as I walked through those mountains I had an utter sense of place and being home.

I’ve travelled to a lot of places in the world. I’ve spent a few months worth of time in the mountains of Nepal. I’ve been in Ethiopian forests with monkeys and wild coffee. I’ve hiked the forests around Machu Pichu. I’ve swatted more bugs than I care to think about in the jungle of central Nicaragua and Mexico and Guatemala.

Most of these places have something akin to clarity when you pause and take them in, but the connection with these western forests in the US is unlike anything I’ve had anywhere else. Even by comparison to the beautiful forests of Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia, and Tennessee, nothing has quite connected with me like these western forests. Something in my dna perhaps. Something about my frame of mind when I’m in them?

What this window into the forest has taught me is that regardless of what is going on in my mind, what my own concerns and pleasures and whatnots are going on, the forest is always out there, carrying on like the natural world does. And the more I remove myself from it, the less clarity in general I tend to feel within myself. And that is not to say I necessarily need to be submersed in it daily. That actually doesn’t tend to be the case, though I crave it most days. The real matter is training my mind to remember it, to remember that grove standing tall just down the way there, signaling and connecting the earth with the atmosphere, because it is all connected, it is all part of the same system. This is the reminder I crave. This is the reminder I need. It helps to be standing in front of it, but with the right mentality, it is there all the while, no matter where I am or what I’m doing. This is the frame of mind I pursue. The clarity. The connection. And when it’s attained, it is wild how many of the world’s problems I for no good reason think I can pick up and carry, fade away.

So in a way it’s become my church. I go in the morning. I get out of my comfort and sit down in the water beneath those trees, even with snow falling and icy banks. Then again in the evening I find myself walking down there. Often I’ll stop in front of this grove and just sit for a minute, listening to the forest go on in the dark with sounds I don’t even necessarily understand. I’ll put my hands in the water, water that is connected down invisibly to those tree roots somewhere deep beneath the frozen banks.

I often think about what a limited scope of vision and sound we have as humans. Our visible spectrum is tiny. What we hear is so minute. Even our sense of smell is dwarfed by what other creatures possess. But somewhere, perhaps tied to our imagination we do have the ability to pick up just a little bit more when we take the time to quiet our consciousness and try to perceive those things that lie connected to us but beyond our skin. I think this is the stuff of religions in some ways. Connection beyond ourselves. And it’s real.

I don’t remember the age, but it must have been around 7 or 8, when I realized with an incredibly vivid dream that my skin was connected to particles, even atmospheric but still very real, which in turn connected to everything I perceive (or don’t) around me. So in a very real way, even though “it’s just air” that connects me to those trees, it is very much a particle connection. Same goes for rivers. People. Animals. Everything.
The world is a wild place when we think of it that way. My mind likes to step into that world. It’s like Narnia, though more realized. And it’s more than fiction. Because it is around us all the time.

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