Through the Woods Darkly

Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.
 —John Muir

Nymphs are proof the woods exist. Ovid knew this, as surely as owls who haunt the limbs of those timeless trees. In this sovereign realm, spiders weave poetry through the green emptiness, turning one gnarled branch into another’s dependent. Squirrels keep the acorn’s secrets, munching away at time-sensitive matter, while secrets buried are breezily told by pushover saplings in Spring. Even shadows point to life, since the mushroom’s darkness is as rich as the leaf’s sunlight and all of them exist through each other. Storm clouds look down upon the same forest they brighten, through lightning’s flicker and the living green the rain sustains. Nothing is not the woods, not within its sylvan embrace. Even rocks are living attributes, since lichen would find itself lost without its jagged little worlds to hold onto. Willows weep over streams that gave rise to them, while stunted pines mark the place where leaves give way to needled heights ruled by the wind. At the edge of the woods, where pavement and dirt collide, a dog barks at the wind in the leaves…until the wolf howls at the Moon, somewhere deep within. The dog falls silent…

The second season I am to know
... You are the sunlight in my growing
So little warmth I’ve felt before
... It isn’t hard to feel me glowing…
 —Led Zeppelin: The Rain Song

Nightfall brings a second season… While the robin roosts, worms surface in the darkness, only to find themselves food for raccoons, since a worm in the mouth is better than poison in town. But that worm is torn in two, leaving the fallen as sentient as the eaten, with one in the belly and the other earthbound, both wriggling into a darkness of their own. Moths pick up where butterflies left off, dusting the starlight with ghostly wings, in fear of bats far more than the flame. Nothing glows without the dark. The Moon knows this, just as the wolf who sees herself in the midnight pond, bright-eyed and hyperaware. While the crickets chirrup night into heaviness, mushrooms fruit into fairy rings, circling their attendant oak in fungal folklore. Underground, the entanglement of mycelium~root carries on its chatter, since secrets pass below, rather than day or night. When darkness gives way to Dawn’s gray, the trees begin to move… Leaves stir just as color returns to them, countless branches holding worlds of birds, fluttering dream-dappled wings. Worms that survived the night spiral back into the mycelial embrace, before sunrise beaks find their other halves. Light and dark find their masterpiece here. When a tree falls, the sapling it shaded is gifted the sunlight, while the wolf keeps the rabbit on the run, until the day-red fox takes over. Night turns to day, giving rise to what had fallen… Entanglement is the woods.

If a tree falls in the forest there are other trees listening. —Peter Wohlleben: The Hidden Life of Trees

Trees spin Time into stillness. A succession of woody rings mark the years, some recording seasons of plenty, while others circle droughts. Creeks delve deeper and discover dark passages only the worms had known. Winter’s teeth crack rocks and roots finish the brutalism softly, prying open the dead to bring light and life between. The nymphs carry on… In the woods, Time is measured through growth and decay, the entanglement of the living and the dead, since both are accustomed to each other and forever dependent. Mythology had no choice but to haunt the woods with such resilience. Centuries pass and fantastical names of nymphs and fairies fade, only to carry on through themselves, since the babbling stream and weeping willow need no human signifier to tell them to persist. Essence remains. Saplings will continue to tell secrets of the acorn, while spiders weave on, daring the emptiness to construct their elegant poems doubling as webs. Even the dog at the edge of the woods knows the wolf’s howl to be timeless. On one of those nights, the dog howls back.

Hayden Moore