Big Leaf Maple-Day 46
The maples in the Hoh Rainforest are festooned with moss and ferns.
Stately queens draped in verdant, living finery.
I found these two sisters leaning their heads toward each other whispering secrets on the breeze.
Of course, the path beckoned right through their outstretched arms.
I would like to pass that way again.
When I lived in Seattle, back in the early sixties when I was only six or maybe seven, my father took us to the Hoh Rainforest. Even now, I can close my eyes and feel the path beneath my small feet, spongy, like walking across the back of some gigantic sleeping creature. Perhaps, a rain dragon covered in moss or maybe a huge sloth curled beneath the maples and swaying spruce.
Great veils of lichen and lacy moss fell from the shoulders of the mighty trees. The forest glowed with that hazy green light that belongs to old places. Spooked, I remember the delicious tremble in my knees as I trailed behind my parents, trying not to get lost and entangled in the living labyrinth where life sprouted from every crevice and hung from every limb.
Later, on Vashon Island, not quite in my early sixties, there was Grandmother Maple, holding court in the meadow outside my door with her matriarchal bearing and gentle rule. She wore a regal gown of spring-green beak moss embellished with a grand tunic of variegated emerald sphagnum. Like epaulets, fairy ferns rose from the many shoulders of her twisting trunk.
Maple enclaves are intimate and mysterious, they inspire tiptoeing awe and an expectation of fairies. They are best friends of Wind with their winged seeds and freewheeling leaves. Sometimes, early in the morning, when the breezes gave them voice, I could hear them discussing autumn fashions, debating crimson versus scarlet and the merits of golden highlights in their foliage this season.
Walking through forests, I always find myself walking through time.
And walking through the Hoh a few years ago, I heard the ancient stories moving through the trees on the tongues of the breeze and realized, startled, that some of the tales belonged to me.
.A few years ago I undertook the 100 Day Project.
Each morning I would sit down with paper, paint, and a question:
Who wants to speak through me today?
As I devoted myself to this practice, I began to understand these small paintings as votive offerings to the living world — simple acts of devotion made with gouache, ink, and lustrous gold paint.
In the evenings I would sit with the day’s painting and write a short reflection about the life of that being, about the ways our lives intersect, or about what I was learning by paying attention.
I have returned to these pieces since, tending and enlarging them, listening for the deeper currents as they slowly gather into a book.
For the next while, I will be sharing these paintings and devotional reflections here on Fridays. Taken together, they form a quiet record of one hundred days spent listening closely to the living world.