Know your forest.

It’s a very specific feeling of something (un)known. Entering the forest that you know means recognising the whole while discovering unfamiliar details.

As you cross the invisible threshold, you become a part of the forest’s body, as you had never left. The forest that you know gives you warmth and protection that your childhood bedroom can’t provide. Everything is moving and changing, but the feeling of the first several minutes in the forest chill is always the same.

You never fully know the forest that you know. Changes from weather, seasons and simply life, barely noticeable or huge, are in every inch of your way through the forest, and each time you discover something new and unfamiliar. 

The more time you spend here, the less you know it, the more you understand about its life. 

To know your forest is to know your path in it. It’s about knowing your way back home at night and in a storm. It is to know a bird by its song and an animal by its tracks. To greet your favourite tree as well as all the trees, to touch the moist, cool tree bark. To know the forest that you know is to surrender to the silence, the haze, and the distant hum of the place. 

At night, you can dream of new routes not far from those that you already took. Later, when you actually take these new routes, you’ll see that they differ slightly from the dream. 

When you leave the forest that you know, you never know when you’ll see it next time. You never know what it will be like next time or how the season will alter the forest that you — for one moment — seemed to know. 

With all this inconsistency, the forest is precisely consistent, being where you left it, as well as you being consistent enough to return to its threshold through city fatigue. 

To return to it as if for the first time, again and again. 

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It’s the first impression of my self appointed artist residency in my favourite forest (Amy Stewart thank you for the inspiration!)