Month 3 started with a long wander.

I walked a forest floor that my feet now were firmly acquainted with and through an intertwining plant and tree world that my senses were beginning to know on a deep level.

The month on the calander had already turned the page and it was Septempber before I began this piece in earnest, a little later due to celebrations of family and time spent guiding people through my process and into the spaces of the forest that were holding my first two installations. I had felt like one of those Mama cats on social media, the ones where the human hand comes in and tries to take one of her kittens away to ahh and oooooh over how cute it is. I firm paw on the excited hand does not always stay the extraction but it always alerts the human attached to the hand that they were on watched time.

I had loved the first encounters with an audience for this project, a few invitations and a few strangers that had come upon them. It was a bit jarring after being so surrounded by forest and not humans as I co created over the months since the beginning in June. As friends and family gathered for a wedding in this wonderous part of the world, the opportunity to share the forest and what we had created seemed reasonable. I didn’t quite expect the nervous stomach and shaky voice as I began to take them into my world.

And here I am now. Everyone had gone home, happy and replete in such a celebration of love and simple welcome. The tourists and seasonal occupants of this place had retreated before the cold weather could set in. I was at ease with the silence and also a little disjointed in my routine of starting points and inspiration search. So, as I have done for so many years, I went for a walk to listen to the Mother, to smell the trees as they exhaled and I inhaled, to let my eyes rest on greens and browns and dappled autumn sunlight.

I strode through bracken and bouncy salal. I stepped into the soft pathways made by deer and the few people that made the trek into this ancient space. I sat for a long time on various fallen logs sipping hot tea from my thermos and wondered if I would find a place and ever have a creative idea to fill it with. Maybe two installations that were heart felt and soul satisfying were enough. Was it? It didn’t feel like the project was complete…yet I continued to wander without a vision of what was coming into being.

Then I sat on a large log with soft bright green moss as a slip cover. I looked over the brim of my cup of steaming cup of tea and forgot to take a sip. There in front of me, in a messy kind of clearing with decades of undisturbed wind fall and no trail in or out clearly defined, was the inspiration for this month.

Three trees danced in front of me, one swaying a youngsters dance on a slim trunk, the sturdier more contemplative tree in the center and another trunk of roughly the same size but dripping with strands of sap that spoke of injury or age. Looking up into their canopy I understood that this last tree had already passed, without any banches filled with green sun glazed needles, her bare limbs seemed to stretch to touch the others as a last gasp of support.

This. This dance of youth and maturity and death was everywhere around me here in this living complex magical place.

I had begun to see the truth of what I had long understood but had not been able to embody as a deep knowing. There was no beginning or end. There were cycles of birth, growth and decay but every THING in this alive and breathing place were travellers in an infinite cycle. What was born today was nourished by the decayed remains of the one who came before.

The mounds and small hills and valleys of the forest floor spoke of past generations. The smell of the rich soil built with centuries of falling leaves and giants. The array of fungi that made a giant delicate mycelium network that efficiently ferried nutrients and knowledge to a young dancing Douglas Fir were first met and connected by her great grandmother, who still rested in the humic soil that cacooned her roots.

The three trees in front of me spoke of the journey inherent in life. The trees that towered over me, whether in youth’s dance, prime arbouthood or just a few shadowed bare branches,

to grow strong and tall, spoke of beginnings. This is where I could step in and we could co create. Such magic was at the beginning it is too spectacular and too effemeral for us humans to really observe or duplicate. The seed.

The seed of this Douglas Fir has everything it will ever be, sleeping in a tiny seed within this cone I hold in my hand. I hold giants in the palm of my hand.

My call was to build a large seed, or pod. A form that would symbolize the masterpiece of nature’s seed.

I call this piece OPUS

Made of fallen branches around me, of Douglas Fir, Western Red Cedar and a few Maples. I gathered and built only to have it fall apart a few times. These are my sketches, plans and failures that lead me into the work that will become a bigger story.

As the piece came into being, I added cordage made of reeds and marsh leaves, I added three circles hanging from the inside of the pod and I gathered rocks at her feet. I added wings, or leaves sprouting from the top as the seed begins to reach for its destiny. I made these with circled branches and autumn’s newly changing leaves sewn into them with thread made of plantain and rushes. Finally, I placed a large web of branches around the base of the triple tree mound, forcing me and any other visitors to walk with intention around the installation, allowing the flow of materials and form and time to have some weight in the interactions.

And now as I am complete in this co creation, I sit on the log with the bright green moss that seems like a brash 1970’s slipcover, and I sip my tea as the sun begins to settle on the horizon beyond the trees.