Run to the trees
(Almost the subject of an email newsletter).
It’s fair to let you know at the outset that this newsletter might tilt towards running in the woods (like a sapling in a gale).
In fact, that was the subject I’d whittled down to when I thought about starting with Substack.
In the end it felt too restrictive and wouldn’t let me cover everything I want to, unless every post consisted of bad tree metaphors (and there’s no growth in that).
Maybe I’ll still do it someday, but until then it’ll be a key theme.
I’m indecisive at the best of times. My mind never stops whirring with things I might do, projects, dreams and whims with no ends.
Running helps to quiet all of that, or to crystallise it, and among trees it works best.
What draws us to the trees?
What is that feeling of otherness settling gently on your shoulders in the dark woods?
In the forest there’s a sense of both the known and the unknown. Among trees there’s both a comfort in your place and a humility in your position.
Maybe it’s a return to the primitive. The animal in us craves the shelter, the abundance, the company of living things. Maybe even the beauty, too.
Our primordial ghosts inhabited a wooded world beyond our ken.
Sometimes it feels like I’m aching to get back there.
The forest is an antidote to a world in which everything is known, predicted, relentlessly surveilled. In the woods things still go unnoticed. Miraculous things we will never know unless we happen to be there at that moment, part of it.
The forest never stops living. Seen or unseen, life cycles on.
It’s a place still full of mystery and magic. Maybe the last place.
Imagine the oldest trees. Living things we can walk among that have seen a world hundreds of years ago we can barely imagine.
There’s comfort in the solidity and stoicism of trees. Given time, they endure or adapt.
We could all learn from that.