183. Look Down, Get Low, Think Small – Joanne Proulx
Photo by Joanne Proulx
How can our world be so scary when there’s more beauty in a square foot of forest, more wisdom than we’d expect in an acre?
One summer I was in a horrible boating accident, which put me in a wheelchair for months. It was over fifteen years ago now and, perhaps oddly, what’s stuck with me most from that time is how the slightest drop in elevation changed everything. Two feet down, I lived in a landscape of crotches, eye-to-eye with first graders, my face a licking post for the tongues of tall dogs. During the long, unsettling days of Covid, I’ve had a similar shift in perspective. With cities shut down, theatres shuttered and friendships cordoned off, I retreated to our family’s cabin in the wilds of Ontario, Canada where I began spending long hours in the forest. As a child I’d collected its stones, mosses and mushrooms, built lush mini-worlds in shoeboxes, populated them with painted acorn people.
This time I took model train people into the forest and got back down on my knees. Stuck a 1/64th-scale woman in a yellow dress into a thatch of broom moss and took her picture. Delightful. But soon I left the tiny people behind and let the forest floor tell its own story. Low down, in the knit of yesterday’s pine needles, everywhere I looked, staggering beauty, so easy to miss while standing.
Stumps like mossy castles, bright orange sea jellies on the bellies of fallen logs, puddles that held the whole sky. I swooned at the mushrooms. Their tininess. The whimsy of their caps. The spring of them in my hand, like rubber spun from silk. How they shot up overnight, untethered from the creep of the human clock. Soon I was in love with thousand-year-old lichens. Took videos of streams and cricks so I could listen to their babble when I left them behind.
I once walked through the world with such certitude, convinced by what lay before me. Now I know reality comes in layers, complex and delicious. Crawling around the forest floor has slowed me down, brought me closer to the earth, and made me somehow braver. How can our world be so scary when there’s more beauty in a square foot of forest, more wisdom than we’d expect in an acre? Humbled, heart opened, desirous, now when I step outside I look down, get low, think small.
– Joanne Proulx
