'...to be lost in the forest is to be lost to this world...'
Angela Carter
I spent last month in Brighton. Living and working in a small wooden cabin in someone else’s back garden.
My Brighton however wasn’t the Brighton of beach and broad-walk, of vegan cafes and sadistic seagulls, of Hen parties and lost weekends. I was out on the Lewes Road, beyond all trends. I was on the edge of the woods.
The wood and the forest were part of my growing up. I went to school in the New Forest, and lived among the woods. The woods I knew were dark and smelt of resin. Individual trees were spiky and gnarled. Not beautiful and never gentle, they fed straight into the imaginings of a curious child with a fascination for the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm.
Eventually this love of fairy tales draw me to Angela Carter, and then my training as a drama therapist took me to the works of Carl Jung, and Bruno Bettelheim. Here archetypes provide strong and flexible frameworks for complex individual identity journeys
While in Brighton, last month, every evening I would pack away my work and walk into the woods to get lost among steep tree lined pathways that narrowed before disappearing into a thicket of nettles and thorns. What I saw I took pictures of, but what I felt and where those feelings took my thinking and where my thinking has taken me is…
Back to Angela Carter and this:
“…to be lost in the forest is to be lost to this world, to be abandoned by the light, to lose yourself utterly with no guarantee you will either find yourself or else be found…”
Overture and Incidental Music
Burning Your Boats
Angela Carter
The language here feels like the language of addiction, of depression, of deep pain. However, is there a possibility that it’s only in losing yourself, giving up all endeavours to define yourself by what you have learnt, been taught (and no they aren’t the same) that you can really hear what you truly are.
If you were lost to this world, what would it allow you to do? If you lost yourself, what might you be?
My work is about walking with uncertainty. Walking with my own comes before I can walk with anyone else’s.
Being lost to myself allows me to be present with others. It’s about letting go of my story to be fully present in the others. It’s an act of selflessness that’s almost impossible to achieve. Therefore, to practice, this city girl goes walking in the forest. In the same way that the country girl I once was would venture into the city to practice flexing the muscles of being present to the dangers, to the possibilities, to the novel, to the profound. To the lessons to be learnt and the knowledge to be acquired. To be alive in the present moment. But not dead to the past or unaware of the future.
Recommendation:
Go get lost in the forest.
Sit a while with uncertainty.
Sit a while longer.
Let it get dark.
Let it get really dark.
It’s pitch now.
You can smell yourself, but you can’t see your hand.
You can hear your breathing but not see your breath.
Go get lost in the forest and sit a while with uncertainty.
For...
'Uncertainty is the only certainty there is.'
John Allan Paulos
Sitting a while with uncertainty
Image: La Caminante
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