crystallee31759: “Something happens to you in an old-growth forest. At first you are curious to see the tremendous girth and height of trees, and you sally forth, eager. You start you saunter, then amble, slower and slower, first like a fox and then an armadillo and then a tortoise, until you are trudging at the pace of an earthworm, and then even slower, the pace of a sassafras leaf’s turning. The blood begins to languish in your veins, until you think it has turned to sap. You hanker to touch the trees and embrace them and lean your face against their bark, and you do. You smell them. You look up at leaves so high their shapes are beyond focus, into far branches with circumferences as thick as most trees. Every limb of your body becomes weighted, and you have to prop yourself up. There’s this strange current of energy running skyward, like a thousand tiny bells tied to your capillaries, ringing with your heartbeat. You sit and lean against one trunk—it’s like leaning against a house or a mountain. The trunk is your spine, the nerve centers reaching into other worlds, below ground and above. You stand and press your body into the ancestral enduring, arms wide, and your fingers do not touch. You how big the unseen gap. If you stay in one place too long, you know you’ll root. I drink old—growth forest in like water. This is the homeland that built us. Here I walk shoulder to shoulder with history—my history. I am in the presence of something ancient and venerable, perhaps of time itself, its unhurried passing marked by immensity solidity, each year purged by fire, cinched by a ring. Here mortality’s roving hands grapple the air. I can see my place as human in a natural order more grand, whole, and functional than I’ve ever witnessed, and I am humbled, not frightened, by it. Comforted. It is as if a round table springs up in the cathedral of pines and God graciously pulls out a chair for me, and I know longer have to worry about what happens to souls.”
Every limb of your body becomes weighted, and you have to prop yourself up. There’s this strange current of energy running skyward, like a thousand tiny bells tied to your capillaries, ringing with your heartbeat. You sit and lean against one trunk—it’s like leaning against a house or a mountain. The trunk is your spine, the nerve centers reaching into other worlds, below ground and above. You stand and press your body into the ancestral enduring, arms wide, and your fingers do not touch. You how big the unseen gap.
If you stay in one place too long, you know you’ll root.
I drink old—growth forest in like water. This is the homeland that built us. Here I walk shoulder to shoulder with history—my history. I am in the presence of something ancient and venerable, perhaps of time itself, its unhurried passing marked by immensity solidity, each year purged by fire, cinched by a ring. Here mortality’s roving hands grapple the air. I can see my place as human in a natural order more grand, whole, and functional than I’ve ever witnessed, and I am humbled, not frightened, by it. Comforted. It is as if a round table springs up in the cathedral of pines and God graciously pulls out a chair for me, and I know longer have to worry about what happens to souls.”