I tricked myself into forgetting, over the years, why I stopped climbing over the garden wall. On summer afternoons I used to wander the woods that stretched for miles behind the row of Victorian houses where I grew up. Lost in thought and childhood fancy, it was as if the hours simply disappeared.
In the late 1980s my family left town, and so I left my hideaways for the last time. And yet with every breath, I always knew a part of it never left me. High school, college, the best years: it rose from the depths in paintings and poetry, in dreams. Was I trying to cure myself? I don’t remember dreaming of them, those who gave me this gift.
No matter. It is here now, spreading from my shoulders and arms and the back of my hands. It started, I later discovered, the very weekend when developers cleared that old stretch of Clapham wood: an itching in the bones, the scent of wet leaves seeping from my pores.
Why hide it? It’s beautiful. And when it takes me, so shall I be.
Inner Forests: An interactive shadow installation [Michael Kontopoulos]
That’s really pretty rad.
H.P. Brownlee
J.G. Johnson
J.L. Beschizza