Another foggy morning – the air is moist, but comfortably unobtrusive at this hour. It is of a temperature that you only feel as a slight caress over your skin. I love that. So many days of the year you brace yourself a little bit before you go outdoors –preparing for a jolt of cold air on the face or a waft of heat, or some kind of atmospheric shift. But a few days of the year are as my younger brother once described at age 10 like this: “The weather was exactly so that you didn’t notice it.”
“Primordial forest” always comes to mind when I walk in the interior paths of this island. It feels like something elemental, something that has existed from the very beginning and will always be. In the dim light of a foggy morning it felt eerier than usual. I could imagine Snow White fleeing through this creepy place in dark fear, before she found her way to the home of the seven dwarves.
It is no wonder that the imagination is engaged out here – this fairy forest, this magic mossy place.
There is more than imagination that is piqued, however.
Living things thrive next to their dead and decaying predecessors – nourished by them, in fact. There are always signs of what used to be, what is, and what is yet to come. Bright living moss covers the remains of old growth, small seedlings sprout up amid a tumble of blown down trees, uprooted by wind or ice or old age. And all is punctuated by the pulse of the sea.
What you see in this forest is no less than the entirety of life’s cycle in perpetuity.
No wonder that it inspires some reflection.
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