Winding down to the final chapter of the forest

I was reading The Way of the Peaceful Warrior recently and a phrase struck me about how life is not a private affair, its stories and teachings are meant to be shared. It made me think about how and why the Forest Archives came into being. Which brought me to the conclusion that has a very complicated answer intertwined with the evolution of a journey.

It was a journey I embarked upon personally which spread into so many aspects of my life and touched me in ways I cannot begin to explain.

It began as a respite. It grew into a deeper connection with faith, it transformed into a personal clarity, at times it became an exile which grew into a love and trasnformed into a joy. At some point I was driven from the sunnier places to the darker places and there were times when there was not much distinction between the forest and my self. Time stopped and meaning changed and I saw the world through different eyes.

But eventually the noise of the world filtered in and time started rustily ticking forward again and I knew that time rarely moves forward without running out. Time has no place in a forest but man packs it in and plants it everywhere.

I have spent a lot of time awestruck by this organism known as a forest. It has a voice and a design and one could spend a lifetime deciphering both.

There was no point to the Forest Archives but to attempt to paint a picture of a place that is fast disappearing. I had other goals along the way but they faded.

I went into it as an outsider, I became familiar and all too soon I am an outsider once again. Life bends and winds itself the way it will and most of us are powerless to stop its direction.

I will visit the forest as long as I am allowed, but the Forest Archives is coming to an end as inevitably as any volume of work. As sure as I can read the hour of the day without a watch or the changing weather without a forecast, I know that this particular journey is ending and I have walked many steps lately weighed down by a sense of the finite.

Its human knowledge of endings which taints our souls and tainted souls cannot really understand a forest’s voice. The forest operates on the premise that everything is infinite, otherwise all that lives within it would despair over their tenuous lives.

I always posted photos under a strict rule for myself that they had to be from the same day and it made me a disciplined photographer. I never aspired to be a good photgrapher, I just aspired to document a forest. So today it is just some favorite photos from the past.

The Forest Archives are definitely approaching an ending and I haven’t decided where it will go from there. Life has a way of surprising us with the future. For now it is merely a postscript in which the author walks the dogs and quietly closes the doors behind me and leaves the key under the mat.