Message from the forest

Blue Sky Black Sheep Prompt: Listen by Barbara Crooker

The forest is trying to tell me something, a message woven into the snow covered footpaths, tucked beneath gnarled branches and festering amongst mushrooms.

I haven’t learned the language of this forest yet; I can feel the message yearning in my bones, its whispers slipping from the mud on my boots into my aching shins and up my spine, where it nestles into tender collar bones. I can feel the words of the forest as they linger there, dancing upon my breast and tickling behind my ear. The frosty breath of winter, there, I can almost hear it, almost understand it, almost see it’s condensating breath against my cheek. There it lingers, unregistered, unheard.

I worry in the unknown: is the forest saying to me “you do not belong” -- am I as strange and unwelcome to it as it has at times felt to me? Do the trees see me as friend or foe, do the dandelion greens I pick and boil into tea feel at home in my belly? Could they nourish me, if they so chose?

I left the lands of California, whose redwood forests and manzana maizes felt like friends, and wondered if the mountains of Europe could feel more like kin. After all, my ancestors once walked roads not so far from here. They stole and took the forests of California; those places do not belong to me, though I feel my own tether of belonging holding me close to them. Those rolling golden hills of home.

I remind myself as the forests’ whispers draw goosebumps across my skin, Europe runs deep in my bloodline. Feet pounding into the snow, down to the earth, a yearning, a claiming. But I’m not so sure the pines here welcome me into this feral forest. I’m not so sure if it is here that I belong. But if not here, then where?

Love from Leysin,
sbmc