Margaret Jarek
The forest is, above all else, a community of living entities. All of its inhabitants, both flora and fauna, are dependent for their survival on the health of the community as a whole.
To enter this community is to come as an outsider, an intruder, and an unwelcome guest at best. Watchful eyes peer at this unwelcome visitor as much out of curiosity as out of fear. To the forest community we are aliens. We come, more often than not, as invaders whose presence, however well-intentioned it may be, is disruptive to the lives of the forest simply by our unwelcome intrusion.
The birds fall silent as we enter. Even the wind holds its breath waiting and wondering what our presence means to the well-being of the community. There is about the forest a kind of inward turning, a contemplative reticence of ancient life forms in whose stillness resides the infinite potentiality of life itself.
The forest, even on a sunny day, is a place of twilight shadows shape-shifting and elusive. The deeper one enters into this arboreal community, the more it becomes a metaphor for the mystery of the human psyche. Like our human souls the forest is a place of hidden meanings and unrevealed secrets where half remembered dreams emerge and dissolve like dust motes in the filtered sunlight.
I never enter the forest without first asking permission, for I know all too well my footsteps will send a tremor through the whole community. I come always in silent reverence as one would enter an ancient cathedral, striving to create an absolute minimum of disturbance or distress. The forest is all too well aware that my kind, more often than not, bring disruption and destruction to this primeval assembly.
We err when we portray ourselves as masters of the natural world. In assuming this posture we pose a real danger to our own species. We may bend the ways of nature to our methodologies for only so long and then rebellion breaks out and our vulnerability becomes increasingly apparent. Nature has no patience with arrogance.
When the forest communities are destroyed we will not long endure. Knowing only too well that the forest views me as a suspicious intruder, I come briefly and only for the solace of its healing energy. I am all too aware that the inhabitants who call it home retain their own counsel, remaining aloof and remote, secret and mysterious.
I sense it does not trust me so I retreat back into my own chaotic world with mingled regrets but also deep respect. I leave the forest then, closing the door, as it were, quietly and tiptoe away back into the sunlight. And even as I depart the wind sighs among the trees, a great sigh of relief, and high in the green canopy a blue jay announces loudly to the community that the intruder has departed.
