By Peg Alford Pursell
Tentative, curious, uncertain, alive, she followed him into the woods, moving in the direction where she imagined the rest of her life waited. So ready for something to happen. The old secret cottage had fallen to the ground. He acted as if that surprise was inconsequential and spread a thin jacket over the dark forest floor.
To lie down was harder than it looked to be. Wasn’t everything?
A thick scent of pine needles. Sour smell of mildewed ash. The moon rose. White and tiny, smeared into the fork of a naked branch overhead. Wind chattered like teeth through the trees, their trunks storing hundreds of years of memory.
In this new dimension of light and shadow, she lost track of who she’d been before, of the home in the town with cracked streets, concrete and glass, sun-scoured spires. Beside her, he said nothing.
A troche on the tongue of the needful earth, she lay, thick thirsting roots deep underneath.
This was something for the body to feel. There is so much for a body to feel before it goes, returns to its simplest elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur.
Full night must eventually come on, its deeper chill. They might remain. Together.
It might turn summer and she’d have survived the season.
Or the earth might be soothed, some want eased.
Originally published by Dzanc, 2019
The Importance of Arts, Culture, The Creative Process, and how this project resonates with you.: I beg forgiveness for this moment of being unprepared to answer. I would be very happy to return to this question, as it gets to the heart of everything and I don't want to treat it lightly. Of course, immediately the words arise with regard to the horror of what is taking place in the world and the Free World, i.e. "now more than ever..." I am grateful for this project. Thank you.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
I'd been deliberating probably too obsessively to decide what to send. I like to be able to have something new for readers. Ultimately, I believe this contribution can contribute meaningfully to your project. I hope so!
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
I grew up in a very small town in the Allegheny Mountains, part of the vast Appalachian Mountain Range of the Eastern US, that extends into western Pennsylvania. I didn't care for any of that as a child: I hardly understood it. But our little village was surrounded by woods, and I was drawn to their mystery. Because I was a girl, I was kept corralled and understood these surrounding landscapes as dangerous and forbidden. In the fairy tales I read, everything happened in the forest! Later, drawn to understandings of Jungian archetypes and later still feminist scholarship on the primeval basis that underpins these understandings, I grasped how our psyches and genetics are intertwined with the wild and the wildness of forests, of trees, all the creatures.
Today I live in Northern California. The ancient redwoods. Here, there have been and will continue to be wildfires that burn it all away. And today, it's become clearer and clearer, wildfires aren't reserved exclusively for the western regions. I don't wish for the next generations to have burned away from them what constitutes our physiological and biological and psychic primordial beings. I don't wish for the mystery of the forest, of the wildness, our wild selves to be replaced by the mystery that is how can we make sure the least of us can survive?
This could be much better written. I'm wanting to give something here (I wasn't expecting this question!). I'd be glad to edit and elaborate.
