Like other Melusine’s I’m drawn to the woods, its not just the gloaming, but everything about the forest dwells in my heart.
The death-quiet, a merciless monument that I enter as a noisy intruder that I’m certain the residents resent. I imagine scurrliness messengers warble warnings, Shee-zeer! Shee-zeer! My imagination is more about me than I desire. I wish to be as Sleeping Beauty thinking they are noticing me. But they are more concerned with their tidy lives, made in instinct and lived moment to moment.
Quietly making my way along the tangled trees, brambles, briars and bracken I can pick out favored shelf fungus, crumbling lichens and indian pipes along the paths. There is delight in the decay as the forest makes itself over flourishing its broken down limb littered leaf-decayed floor.
There’s an aroma that lifts from damp leaves, moldy with ashey spots and black rip edges as they catch on my feet. Twining twisted vine twirl about me in a rage at the dying of the season.
A token of love
I bring man-made artificiality to the Nature. Diminutive in stature compared to the Nature, the human makes its mark in creating tawdry and putting a price on it.
We churn it, first in the making, then the marketing, the amassing and finally the discarding. We cannot dig our holes deep enough to contain the baubles. Steady streams run-off products and by-products and the empty worth trailing off into now-nothingness. Land. Ocean. Space. Will fill them all.
An installation and self portrait I created in the woods 2002—Photographed credit: self.
Boundless 