One summer I was a bridesmaid in a wedding and a few weeks before the wedding, the bridesmaids and bride spent a weekend together in the country. We canoed on the lake and sunbathed on the dock and drank martinis in the screened-in porch, and one morning we gathered ourselves together for a hike through the woods to the top of a mountain nearby. I remember this hike very well---entering the damp, cool woods; the darkness of it; the dizzying endlessness of trees. In woods like this, under the towering trees and renewed by the thick air, I lose my familiar dimensions----I'm not sure where my skin separates my body from the air around it. Everything feels different. The real world----my previous life of five minutes ago--seems suddenly absurd and ridiculous. So much rich air. Little sparkly holes of light. The way hikers grow quiet and enter a rhythm together. Or maybe we didn't grow quiet. We were probably talking, actually; we were often talking back then.
We were walking like this---who knows for how long----when a sound, no, more like a sensation, occurred. The incident took long enough that we all stopped, and stopped talking and held our breath and listened. Someone reached out to another, not in terror but in awe. It was possible that this was an attack of some sort; or the first tremors of the end of the world. A tremendous whoooooooooooosh and a cluster of delicate cracklings, I thought perhaps it was a boat held up by a crane on a dock, let go and falling into the lake's water. But we were too far from the lake, and this was so prolonged, sustained, and beautiful. A sound and sensation only pure, pure nature could make. We listened, and we felt it as the sound rushed through the thick air and reverberated through the dense soaked earth. The sensation it created was like the most gentle kiss. Or the relinquished control as your car spins out of control on ice. The sensation was like those infrequent moments when you leave your body and feel no fear, shame, irritation, or desire; the world is what it is and you appreciate it. It was like all that, and then it ended.
But before the sound----which seemed to happen disproportionate to natural time, like a dream----ended, we had each come to know the story. A tree was falling. It must have been a huge one, we never did see it. A tree had fallen in the woods, and we did indeed hear it.
*
I contemplated this painting for a long time, and this tree-falling moment was what I thought about when I studied Margaret's panting. So I thought about those woods, and that wedding, and I thought about how that marriage is ending now, and the sadness and hardship of that. But having thought about all this for a long time, I finally read Margaret's title and it immediately struck me, so much so that I gasped. It made me laugh and brought me such joy, for now I understand that the painting (like so much) is not about the woods, it's about the path through the woods.
Painting by Margaret Sweet, writing by Emilie Oyen
Comments