“The woods roads are clogged with debris, and so the mind walks its rounds upon what has fallen away. Hardly a day but my muddled footprints again press a random mess, sinking deep into the muck. I have to wonder where my father is, no longer raking leaves with a clumsy hand tool into a pile, before it all came down. The internet, the screen, the blue light of modernity was never a part of his world, a world in which we jumped off the porch with umbrellas, hoping to fly. A world of sadness, easily traced to things like innocence, ambition, and affairs, perhaps, but one removed from technological notation. It’s why I’ve never left the woods, I suppose, and why I continue to bring to it all my generational trauma. I love the woods for the clues it gives, and the silent witnessing it provides. Far, far away from my electronic ghost, where I am judged & argued over, where I am no longer real. Do others feel this duality? With so much left, undiscovered, I wear my own face, in the woods. And it’s a relief.”
