Before the rains, she goes into the forest.

Wrote the following piece one evening last week on the cusp of the mega-rain last weekend, in response to these prompts and also memories of hiking up in Mendocino, at Russian Gulch State Campground:

•  “The forest is a place in which everything your heart desires and fears lives.” by Charles Simic, in the book Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell,  a quote I found on Peg Alford Purcell's Instagram: .
  
• Arriving at the Church of Poetry.*
  
• She gave a sweet, slightly mocking, smile.*

* Sources undocumented. Apologies. Will try to track the authors down for these two quotes.  

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Arriving, she gave a sweet, slightly mocking smile. This, indeed, was the church of poetry: this forest, which the heart desired, this forest, where fear conspired. She walked into the cathedral of tree trunks, dwarfed by the redwood spires that twisted slightly as they rose; that smell, as pungent as cinnamon, that damp as close as a best friend. The path was wide and spongey,  bordered by ferns at times, ferns as big as cows, as big as desire, as big as the space between molecules, which when she thinks of it, is a big as it gets.

She sidestepped a big yellow banana slug, munching its way along the muddy edge of the path and then was startled by the big eyes of a mottled salamander, skin glistening as it turned and vanished under the soggy edge of a log, the felled corpse of a redwood lying parallel to the trail for a hundred feet or more. The horizontal trunk, blanketed by green moss, was high enough to be a bench to sit on, wide enough to walk along with out having to balance, simply placing one foot casually in front of the other.

She walked along the wide trunk, soft and crumpling a bit underfoot, a highway to the inner courts, to that confluence of light and mist, that tapestry that captures just what is molecule and what is wave, where dissolving is not so much an act as a state of being.