Is it the home of my ancestors?

Or more inward and mysterious and soaked with light, just metres away?

Or both at once?

Then again, here in Secwépemc Territory, it is often a savanna, ingrown because of a failure to see anything other than a European forest. Trees that might otherwise live five hundred or a thousand years die at 200 when this kind of thing happens. The old ones below should be surrounded by grass. “Succession,” this is called. Hunh.

Or is it the aspens, that are not trees but stands rising from a single underground being?

And what about fallen trees? Have they left the forest?

It doesn’t appear so. Even the water is the forest.

It is beautiful to watch boundaries vanish right in front of your eyes.

Blessed be.