A Forest Walk

musings on belonging and witnessing

We say, moss-green, but in the forest by my house moss is smoky-grey, Day-Glo green, crisp yellow, and a dozen greens in-between. The brilliant green sphagnum mosses with their little sticky-out limbs give underfoot as I walk, tempting me to sink in and put my face to its generous depth.

A guest once said the soft grey lichens with their budding red heads, that grow right out of the rock, are called British Soldiers. She knew things about the forest, corrected me when I called those improbable lichens moss, and told me that those ones in particular, healthy and abundant as they are in the forest by my home, indicate a vibrant ecosystem. That the land where I live is healthy. But today as I walk, I pass a discarded car battery. Once, I found a severed wolf skull.

The path up the hill isn’t pretty in the way one might expect of a forest walk. The ground is damp and spongy with decay. Trees sprawl like pick-up sticks on either side, many carpeted with fungus, most blackened with mold.

When I come out into the open, great fissures in ancient quartz and limestone tell the story of oceans and volcanoes pushing this land up from the equator.  

There’s nothing easy to eat here in the forest by my home. If you’re lucky in the summer to get there before the bears, you can squat down to pick the tiny succulent blueberries. Thimbleberries grow here as well but they are more seeds than fruit. Also, try to get there before the bears. Wintergreen is good for the breath and a dab of vitamin C but too pithy to actually eat. (I’ve tried.) Wintergreen, as the name suggests, stays green all year round and can be found throughout the forest. Oak trees toss down acorns, that were you so inclined, could be roasted and ground for meal or flour. Squirrels love them. Apparently, the soft flesh on the undersides of pine cones is edible, but I know no one with the time or inclination to try that out. Even my son, who spent seven months on the land in wilderness survival training, declines to chew on cattails (also edible and in abundance).

Still, today as I walk, my heart rises and falls in unison with the crickets, busy as they are in every pocket of the forest. Everything is unbearably beautiful—the way light creates shadows on a single leaf, the way a shallow puddle reflects cloud, the sound of a two-toned bird call just to my left. I weep because I cannot contain what fills me.

We don’t belong here. That’s what I find here in the forest by my home. This clumsy body, loud and probably smelly, wearing absurd colours, trying to find its way, when every other creature knows what they’re supposed to do. While we have to figure it out, step by misguided step. The creatures of this forest don’t likely feel hollow or confused or wonder why they’re here at all—not the bear or the squirrel, the moss or the bright orange mushroom.

There are those who come to the forest to drink beer, start fires, and make a lot of noise. I wonder if all that commotion is them raging against their own emptiness, their fear of meaninglessness; an attempt to prove themselves of some consequence.  

When I am here in the forest, it is so clear how my existence means nothing. I am small and inconsequential. I am simply a witness, grateful beyond measure. On my way home, I tread lightly on the mosses and lichen.