Lost in the Forest

Lost in the forest...

Lost in the forest,

I broke off a dark twig
and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:
maybe it was the voice of the rain crying,
a cracked bell,

or a torn heart.

Something from far off it seemed
deep and secret to me,

hidden by the earth,
a shout muffled by huge autumns,
by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.

Wakening from the dreaming forest there,

the hazel-sprig sang under my tongue,

its drifting fragrance climbed up through my conscious mind

as if suddenly the roots I had left behind cried out to me,

the land I had lost with my childhood---
and I stopped,

wounded by the wandering scent.

Pablo Neruda

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I’ve worked on this video for a couple of hours, then spent hours more trying to figure out how to format it so I can upload it directly here. I never got it to work but it works on Photodex.

Watch it here: http://www.photodex.com/sharing/viewshow.html?fl=3056589&alb=0

I’ve been reading Pablo Neruda’s poems today and this one caught me. I spent a couple of days in the mountains . . . hiking . . . reminiscing . . . soul-searching . . .

The land of my fathers, the land and the mountains where I spent my youth – they call out to me. Perhaps I would never see them again. Perhaps I would. The days I’ve spent in North Lake Tahoe have partially calmed my soul . . . I crave for more, though.

In the middle of the forest, the smell of the pine trees has transported me back to a time in my childhood when I used to play hide-and-seek in the trees with my friends. I remember the crude tree house we made . . . it wasn’t even a house, really. It was discarded cardboard set atop some branches with a makeshift rope ladder. I remember it being fun, though. We could take up the ladder and quietly watch people as they passed by without them knowing that we were there.

I’d like to be lost in the forest again, to be enmeshed in its sounds, its smell. . .