Scar

Fall of 2020 I was training to be a forest therapy guide.  It was Covid and my first forest bathing walk took place via Zoom. At the time, it felt odd, but it worked.  I was alone in the forest with a voice from the Canadian Rockies via my iPhone calmly directing myself and other participants, also on their phones. We’d done a meditation geared towards awakening our senses, bringing us into a liminal space. For the next forty minutes, invitations like — “what’s in motion “ and “find textures” were given. Directional, but open. The final invitation was to “be with a tree.” For fifteen minutes.

It’s probably a good time to admit my thing — that four-letter acronym used to describe “distractable” types. So of course I began by getting busy. I cleaned up the underbrush and arranged it in an orderly pile. Yeah, like that’s natural order…

For fucks sake I was three minutes in and I’d already wasted time.

Then I sat and faced the tree.  I was on her shade side.  Lichen and moss forms were everywhere.  The closer I looked the more complex and beautiful this network of life became. I sat with that for several minutes. Then my eyes rose, to her trunk. Elephant-like, hard as a rock to the touch, and smooth — especially for a tree in these parts — except for the scars. They are hardly visible from where one might stand from a tree, 3-10 feet.  But up close, a ruler’s length from my nose, scars were everywhere. Some were running lengthwise, some horizontally, others just nodes from branches that sprouted and fell a long time ago. 

”You have suffered,” was my thought at the time. “You are so much more than bark and branches and pretty leaves that fall in autumn. You have been through life.”

I immediately connected with that.  

From that point on, my connection to the forest and my artistic practice became so deeply intertwined that they became one.  

I painted a Beech tree swallowing barbed wire. I had come across a line of trees that many years ago had been hastily used as fence posts.  A fence post won’t swallow barbed wire, but a tree will.   And it will form a permanent scar with the wire becoming part of the tree forever.

Sound familiar?