Being somewhere, but nowhere

Thoughts, going from day to night

A gust of wind has a way of erasing a place as you stand right in the middle of it. Sitting at the edge of the woods, where you feel mother nature against your skin, and suddenly you are caught between two minds. Two worlds even. Not lost, exactly, but more unmoored. Somewhere, but nowhere.

The canopy creaks. The wood groans and travels down a trunk and into the soles of your feet. Some may even say that the trees are talking to you; but they are merely enduring each other’s weight as the wind passes.

Occasionally, this is interrupted by a crow or even a jackdaw, flinging itself across the sky above. Their squawks are sharp, splintered things, full of a fierce, brief business. They see the world from a height we can’t manage, marking out territories that dissolve the moment they close their wings.

To be nowhere is also to want to anchor oneself, however briefly. We find the fallen pieces of what surround us, the occasional root-plates upturned like a dinner plate of clay and stone, and we begin to build.

Pick up the snapped birch boughs, and prop them slantwise against a trunk. Handfuls of damp bracken, maybe some of last year’s heather, dried and crisp, with the odd rotted texture of moss.

I think it’s an ancient impulse, this den-making. A low, dark space that one can crawl into, just big enough to hold a body and its breath. Inside, the smell is that of earth. Sitting for an hour, and you are entirely present, tucked into its ribs. It’s a fragile thing. One steps out, and the den immediately reverts to what it always was. Just a pile of deadwood waiting to disappear back into the forest floor.

Then things begin to shift. It doesn’t happen all at once. The light fades from the landscape. The surrounding area loses its colour, the air slowly drops, and things merge into a single, bruised blue silhouette.

This isn’t the end of the day. The day doesn’t end so much as it retreats, pulling its light upward into a slip of sky, leaving a landscape to fend for itself.

The birds go quiet, or should I say, their voices change. That daytime bickering we have all become accustomed to, settles into a few lonely, low clicks. The creaking of birch grows heavier in the dusk, and it sounds more like an old house settling into its foundations.

Standing there as it nears darkness, one is no longer part of the woods. Just a point of awareness between the earth and the stars above, perfectly still, taking a deep breath, ready for tomorrow.