What are we looking at? Some of you were pretty close - it is in fact the wallow of a wild boar!
On a wonderfully wild December day we ventured into the fantastic Forest
of Dean and found signs and great hoof tracks and wallows scattered
everywhere. Most of the wallows were centered on an old stump or root so
they must like to have a bit of a scratch. In the thicker parts of the
forest it felt like at any second we might have stumbled on a herd
of ten or more wild boar giving me a feeling of something quite
primeval, timeless even. And this subtle sense of timelessness opened up a shift in my perception, in my consciousness of the forest: for the forest was now no longer a plaything, it
was something far larger than my understanding, an entity to be enveloped in, where I began to
search all around me, alert for flickers of movement in my peripheral vision, watching for the watchers of old.
Ivy-clad trunk with a wallow at it's base.
Looking into the forest
Another place, another forest, Newfoundland and an encounter several years ago
Moose
Eventide gushes in dark as
blankets of squid ink.
Now they are stirring,
legs unfolding, joint after
joint,
mounds rising from the
earth,
great forms that move and
breathe:
breathing, breathing.
Their bodies drift upwards,
now held aloft in the thick evening fug,
long legs so thin they seem
inconsequential,
moss and needles dripping
into slots:
each new-pressed slot
filling with a dark water that oozes quietly in.
Forty-five yards away my
eyes are two small moons,
a great breath is captive
within me
and my heart is thumping
out the rhythm I’m tree, I’m tree loud
enough to convince myself, almost and yet,
I am of moss and mud and
air
and only wish I was of
antler and bone and tree.
Within that vast cloak of
spruce who’s edges are frayed and worn
they stir, they are
restless
they appear and disappear
at will and not of my choosing
I watch as the slow drift
of a moose passes and is no more.
Within that vast cloak of
spruce who’s edges are frayed and worn
they are like ideas,
hundreds thick
rustling across the
threshold of my understanding.
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