Mossing
Fall to all fours. This is what the forest demands. Crawl over pine needles turned by time into airy earth. Bridge moss-wrapped boulders and wonder at their origins. Moss begins to grow on your hands, knees and feet. It covers, but doesn’t weigh you down. You’ve never felt lighter, even as a thick sleeve grows up your arm. Lichens appear, the symbiosis of algae and fungi accelerated by your surrender. Seeds sprout from your elbows. Still you inch, uncertain, but it’s no longer the drag of an injured woman from a roadside crash. You’re walking on all fours, powered by the vegetation as if the creeping fronds are feeding you, helping you bear their sodden weight. Your burnt rags disintegrate. The moss becomes the primeval fur in which you feel utterly at home. With all this green life you’re growing smaller but stronger; you must fit the forest. Moss is moulding a dying woman but something else is happening too. You can’t see this other thing but it’s all around you. It’s a smell. Of the damp, the pine and the rot. Did you have to crash to understand your chemical allure? Other scents emerge. There’s a whole orchestra playing. What you thought simply pine and decay were always composites, harmonised by plants and creatures into this symphony of soul. Somehow you still know about symphonies and orchestras but they mean something different here. Concepts empty their human meanings into the forest and are refilled by animal meanings, plant meanings, fungal meanings. What is asked of you here you’ve already given. It can’t be measured – the unfinished time of moss regenerating.
Written in response to Tay Forest, Perth and Kinross, Scotland