The woods are performing extraordinary feats of weirdness lately. It’s beautiful to watch, to witness, to walk out into and dawdle in. The understory of the forest is burning away in the cold nights and hot days of September revealing everything I never noticed during the fat lush green of the summer months. Each morning, I like to walk out on the road that runs East of the Little Cabin In The Woods. Apparently there are plots of purchased land there where someday someone may eventually build cabins. I am thankful such a thing hasn’t happened yet. I like to be on the end of the road, tucked away and secret. This road of mine leading East from the cabin is a road that is being reclaimed by the forest. In point of fact, it’s more of a path now in many places, two track absorbed by grasses, shrubs and toadstools. To make my way down the road, I scramble over and under fallen douglas fir, scoot under widow makers, scamper through thick alder, scrape my way through wild rose. It’s a jumbly, tumbly, fresh way to begin my morning. I call it “heading out to the Tabernacle” (I’ve always loved the sound of that word) where the trees rise like the graceful arches in ancient cathedrals and I bow my head and shut my eyes when I feel the Holy descend on my shoulders like doves.
There is much to see in the morning light and oh! The morning light! The way it falls and filters silver and gold through the timber, like someone far away in the sky is playing a glockenspiel and I see only a glimmer of the glinting tune falling through clear sky to land softly on pine and fir duff. It’s exquisite. It rained this morning and the world is wet with bright contrast. The colors are divine, water droplets on leaf faces refract light. The trees are dripping. The moss is especially springy, rising up, plump on rainfall, merry little sprockets.
With all the rain we’ve had tumble to earth lately, there has been a mushroom explosion. I thought to myself this morning, “If the earth laughs in flowers, it burps in mushrooms.” Mushrooms are a sign of earth well watered. They’re heaving up through the forest floor, lumpy and bumpy, mushy and crushy. They’re such surreal little things. Where the forest floor was once settled and relatively smooth, it’s now mumpy with mushrooms. I bend over and inspect each one. Some are larger than my head. Some make minute paths like fairy trails through the mosses. Some are grotesque. Some are darling.
Some are so magical they emit rainbow auras!
I love it here right now. Transition is in the atmosphere. The forest is diligent about changing daily (hourly) and I keep attempting to notice it all. If I only had a thousand eyes, a million noses, a trillion ears, an infinity of touch, I could notice it all and not miss a thing. I could watch the turn and fall of every single leaf, the mottled and burned yellow of the aspen, the festering scent of must and mold, the elegance of the rose hips, the depths of the gills of every mushroom, the dorky antics of the ruffed grouse, the sound of a single leaf releasing the final silken fiber that connects it to the tree corporeal.
