Into the Would

I've spent a very large amount of time in the woods throughout this summer and early autumn 2014, running, walking, drawing and reading, watching the birds and just sitting, moping around. I  want to start writing about what that's like and why I am so drawn to the woods. I couldn't get the name Into The Wood (an homage to Thoreau, not Sondheim) but quite like the alternative, Into the Would. This misnomer suggests the woods as a place of imminent possibility, of daydreaming and spaciousness. So that's what I want this blog to be like, a big wild possible would.

On of my plans for this blog is to review some great tree themed books I've read recently including:

I'm going to start here with Sarah Maitland's Gossip from the Forest, which has (among other UK sites) really interesting chapters on London locations Sydenham Hill Woods and Epping Forest. Each of the twelve fairy stories is interspersed with an essay on forests, I usually skip the fictional bits when people try to do things like that, and this book is no exception, but it's still a rewarding read.  

"In this fascinating book, Maitland argues that the two forms are intimately connected: the mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forests were both the background and the source of fairy tales. Yet both forests and fairy stories are at risk and their loss deprives us of our cultural lifeblood."

Sarah Maitland makes a convincing case for forests as the originary source of fairy tales and an even more important point about the role of urbanity and technology in eroding some of the mystery and magic of our forestsy imaginings. One of the things I love about Sydenham Hill Woods is the lack of phone and internet signal. In the absence of all that noise we can revert to a more embodied state. Deep in the forest I am quite literally unshackled from the grasp of work. 

Maitland makes the point that few children in the UK are now able to experience being in a forest on their own, and, if they are on their own, they have probably been given a phone to keep in touch. I spent a lot of time on my own and with other children in the Sydenham Hill Woods as a child in the 1970s. We did get into horrendous situations, but even so, in the long run, they may have been valuable, if traumatising, learning experiences....or just the side-effects of a life lived with any significant degree of freedom. 
"I seriously fear," the books says "that we are failing to nourish the beautiful and precious quality of resilience in our children."

The section in Gossip from the Forest about the New Forest presents an aptly complex relationship between cultural colonisation and the preservation of the forest, in fact it would not have thrived without the heavy handed Norman sequestering.  I read this book while camping in the New Forest and found it doubly magical for being there.

The book is earnest in places, but also beautiful to read at times, anyone whose been to Hertfordshire in the spring will know exactly what Sarah Maitland means when she writes of "the strange smoky shimmer"  of the Bluebell woods......

I've been trying to evoke the mystery and magic of the woods in my own work recently, to convey what Maitland describes as the "secret gifts and perils and the knowledge that you have to go through them to get to anywhere else".  In particular I like the passage away from Lordship Lane to the very centre of the woods, it evokes a kind of birth as well as a dream state, a return of some kind.

Above, the Cox' Walk, entrance to Sydenham Hill Woods. Below, the last remnant of the Great North Wood on Streatham Common,  both October 2014.