The Endless Forest

(The End of the Forest)

dedicated to my grandmother, Christina Belle Blank, 

lover of trees, and as resilient, strong, and inspiring

1

After my maternal grandmother died at ninety-four years old, I began taking photographs of tree shadows in her neighborhood. The shadows felt like a manifestation of her passing into the spirit dimension. Though I don’t believe in a literal spirit world, I do believe that everything we can imagine is real.

I did not know my grandmother nearly as well as I’d have liked. My grief from losing her seemed somehow deep and disarticulated, like falling and scattered autumn leaves.

I feel the disappearance of forests in a similar way. I began to connect the grief I have for my grandmother, for all of my ancestors, to the mourning I experience around the climate crisis and environmental degradation. My grandmother had extensive knowledge of trees. She did not acquire her knowledge through formal study, but rather absorbed it as a natural feature of growing up in a different time and place. I realized I felt just as disconnected to “nature” as I did to my ancestral traditions, to their ways of knowing and feeling the environment.

I was aware that trees communicated with each other through fungi in the soil, but I wanted to know more. I needed to know more. So I started reading about forest ecology. I read about the extensive mycorrhizal network in the soil of healthy, old-growth forests, sometimes called the wood wide web, and the importance of mother trees—the biggest, oldest trees that support nearby saplings by sharing resources and encouraging healthy, slow growth. I began to understand mourning as the shadow of wonder and love: to see a shadow is to know there is light. 

Our world is alive and teeming, but it is also dying. The mass extinction event we are living through is made possible in part by a collective human wound that manifests as an inability to recognize the more-than-human world as our kin, as mirrors of ourselves, inherently worthy of protection and worship. 

The human psyche evolved over millennia, and the archetypes and mythologies of our cultures are by their very nature embedded in the animate, more-than-human natural world. However, unlike all human communities before us, we have something unique: global communication and a global collective consciousness, entangled in a complex of markets, national “borders”, the web/dark web, and telecommunications. Just as we are feverishly creating new technologies, we are forgetting old stories.

I want to remember and reclaim the old stories. Draw them back into my body and my psyche so they form the rich loam of imagination, divination, and creation. 

Archeologists and anthropologists tell us our earliest ancestors lived among the trees. So that is where I propose we begin.

2

Some days ripen with color and sparkle. Some sink into the gray. We are both light and shadow, living complex and contradictory lives. Finding wholeness requires both purposeful discovery and constant remembering.  

The endless forest is my mind, and it is your mind, too. 

The forest has long been a mythological symbol of an inner journey. The monsters heroes encounter in the dark and dangerous forest are generally symbolic of issues we all face at some point in our lives: fear, loss, growing up, growing old, finding strength, confronting death. 

I know two things in my bones. 

One, we are all intimately, physically, and spiritually, connected to everything in the universe. 

Two, creation and destruction are one, a constant psychic, energetic turbulence, quantum entanglement. 

To heal from hurt and grief, we must face our shadow selves and accept both the light and the dark within us. I created this deck first and foremost for myself, as a tool for finding my way through the woods of my mind. I needed to create something to help myself on my own endless gray days. I needed to reweave the threads of my existence into something new and hopeful. Something lively. Something more connected, embedded in earth, and aligned with my deeper values. 

The Endless Forest is my offering to myself, a collection of visual spells or suggestions that help me to understand my place—

sensually, 

(im)materially—

in the world. 

I now offer it to you.

3

What is this place I call the outside world and this space I call my mind? 

I have always been fascinated by the way the mind creates experience. I have especially been confounded by the fact that my mind is entirely different than your mind, and that human minds are entirely different from tiger minds or spider minds. The shape of our bodies and the sensory organs we are equipped with create different physical experiences with our electricity-powered nervous systems, and yet we interact within the same landscape and can even endeavor to understand each other with the power of language, gesture, imagination, patterns, and empathy. This complex of neurological processes gives rise to conscious experience, allowing us to be rooted along a continuum of time stretching from the present back through memory and forward into an unfolding future.

No matter how or where you live, you inhabit a body that interacts at all moments with the surrounding ecosystem and physical properties of the environment. Our earth, where we spend our lives, is a clump of rock and water surrounded by an envelope of magnetized gas particles careening at incomprehensible speeds around other clumps of rock and gas in a vast universe (perhaps even many universes)—a concept that our earth-born minds cannot ever truly comprehend. For millennia we humans have bent our knees to this unknowable vastness, turning away from earth and toward sky.

Western civilization and religion is, in part, a history of this turning away. Humans began as mostly earth-worshippers (paganism, animism), believing everything was imbued with spirit or life-force. Slowly we transitioned to being mostly sky-worshippers (Zororastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam), where the good spirit became but a distant smudge in the heavens, and the evil spirit became a demon living deep beneath our feet. The one father god and his divine messengers overtook mother goddesses, matriarchal societies, and animistic earth-based spiritualities. The allure of this magical place in the sky that glittered and gleamed eternal had wide appeal, and slowly our reverence for the plants, animals, rocks, water, and weather spirits faded away.

Even now, one could readily argue our ultimate goal as a society (U.S.) is to leave earth. We are ever hoping to transcend the boundaries of the ground and fly—into heaven, into space, into utopia, which means no place. During the space race, and still today, our government spent billions of dollars on spaceships and rockets and tools designed to carry us away, away, away. Two of the richest men in the world are now investing their fortunes in technology that will someday allow us to forsake earth’s gravitational pull and set us free to travel and perhaps even live among the stars. 

What does it mean that we seek a utopia, a no place? Who do we become in such a theoretical no place existing in such a theoretical future? If we begin to over-identify our collective selves with a future no place, or ourselves with a future ideal self, we loosen the threads tying our identities to the place in which we physically exist: the earth, the land, the here, the now. 

Everything you can be lies in the infinitesimal space just beyond what you already are. 

Yet I am a sky-worshipper, too. I, too, dream at the sight of stars. But while our eyes and imaginations have been trained on the sky, we’ve been destroying our essential relationship to earth, to the below, 

to shadow, 

dark, 

dirt.

What I mean is this:

As the Abrahamic religions overtook animistic spiritualities, 

as patriarchal societies began stealing rights and power from mothers, 

as agriculture increased in complexity and efficiency, 

as feudalism and capitalism and other exploitative economic systems established themselves as illusions of inevitability, 

as Europeans colonized, slaughtered, raped, and stole land and language from Indigenous peoples, 

as white settlers became rich with the blood of black and brown bodies and slaves, 

as deforestation, industrialization, extraction machines, telecommunications, and market globalization created the conditions for our contemporary human habitat, 

we forgot that everything alive is more same than different, more close than distant. 

I created this deck because I felt the sickness of this forgetting in my own body. Dissociating from my own desires, instincts, feelings, and sensual presence to please others. Falling asleep to my own hurt and anger. Wishing I was elsewhere, wishing for a future no place. 

I needed to worship earth to get back to myself. Now I ask that we all turn our gazes down, down to our feet, to beneath the soil, where roots intertwine and things decompose. Where we all end up in death: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Not floating somewhere in the sky, but folded into layers of rock, dirt, water, magma, until once again our dissolved bones join the planet’s womb in its burning center. So we worship earth and sky, shadow and light, joy and suffering, predator and prey, life and death, equally, as they are two aspects of the same spirit, two faces of the same body. The bigsmall lightdark.

In Sufism, the mystic tradition of Islam, the believer’s relationship to god is based on the metaphor of love, intimacy, and romance. Sufis reject the notion that god is distant, judgmental, and separate. They understand that we are god’s eyes, and god is the light and the dark in our eyes. Through god’s eyes, we witness the miracle of earth. Naturally then, Sufis revere the smallest speck of dirt the same as the infinite cosmos, because god/spirit/energy exists equally in both. It is like spirit and matter are quantumly entangled, bound forever at all scales and in all dimensions.

Take a look outside yourself, wherever you are in this moment. Where are you? What are you doing? Where did you come from? Where are you going? How do you navigate within the physical world, within society, and within the web of other living things? How do you navigate within the landscape of your mind? What is this place called the outside world, and what is this space called the mind? 

The answers to these questions belong to you. No one else can ever own these truths for you. They are yours and yours alone. You alone have the right to everything in yourself—your body, your emotions, your thoughts. This right is also a responsibility. You are responsible for owning yourself as a presence in the world. You create your own energy and you draw your own boundaries. You may not be able to control what’s happening elsewhere, but you own your ripple effects.  

4

The shadow self is all those qualities we repress in ourselves and revile in others. Unseemly qualities and behaviors that we observe in others, we resist seeing in ourselves. So our minds obscure those negative aspects of ourselves, hiding them from our conscious mind and burying them into the subconscious. The more we push away and ignore those dark, repressed qualities, the larger our shadow grows and the stronger it becomes. 

Carl Jung said, “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is an essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.” (Aion, 1951)

(Carl Jung is certainly not the only person to have conceived of the shadow self. It has been a key concept in many other contexts, such as animistic traditions and indigenous knowledge, for millennia. However, Jung was able to translate these ideas of the shadow self into the terms and language of western culture via analytical psychology, and the dialectic that developed around his writings can help provide a useful vocabulary for the western context.)

Collective society also has a shadow. The shadow of so-called western civilization is long and dark. Grieving, personally and collectively, is a necessary part of confronting that shadow, and the associated guilt, shame, fear, and anger that grows out of such bloody soil. An ecological, spiritual consciousness is not mutually exclusive with political consciousness. Indeed, the only kind of consciousness that truly matters is one that is by its very nature, political. 

This landscape of shadow and mystery is home to all of us. It is where we go to grieve and mourn, to remember and forget, to time travel between past and present and future.

When exploring your shadow realm, I offer the following to consider:

The antidote to despair is action. You decide what that action looks like. 

Showing up for ourselves and others, even when it creates conflict, challenge, and discomfort, is our right and responsibility. 

Science and magic coexist, they are just two words for the same thing seen from opposite sides. 

We all have hard work to attend to. Let us support each other by practicing vulnerability and openness, even when it feels impossible. Let us also learn how to set boundaries and protect our nests from violence. 

Hold on tight to your childish curiosity and your desire to explore and imagine. Entire new worlds form when we dream them into existence. 

5

As Above, So Below is an aphorism associated with sacred geometry and Hermeticism. It is commonly heard in occult and neo-pagan traditions. The origin of this saying is credited to Hermes Trismegistus, supposed author of The Emerald Tablet, one famed component of the Hermetica, mysterious Egyptian-Greek dialogue-texts dated from the 2nd century or before. The Emerald Tablet was thought to contain the secret of prima materia or first matter, the formless alchemical substance required for the creation of the philosopher’s stone.  

One translation reads: “That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above, corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracle of the One Thing.” 

We humans living on Earth are the Below, while the stars, angels, deities, and celestial bodies refer to that which is above. The original meaning was that earthly matters reflect astral or celestial matters, through synchronicities and correspondences. The microcosm reflects the macrocosm. Individual problems can result from larger societal problems, and vice versa—the individual actions reflect on the larger societal scale. The microclimate is affected by the larger ecological climate, just as the smallest actions can create ripple effects that reverberate throughout an ecosystem. In witchcraft, some have interpreted this phrase as the union of light and dark, heaven and hell. There is no real separation between any of the dualisms we have spent much of western philosophy solidifying. They swirl together—goodbad, lightdark, insideout, quietloud.

As above, so below. As within, so without. What energy we create internally is reflected and refracted outward into our environment. Our brains manifest reality as our neurons process sensory information and create a “world-map” to aid survival. This world-map varies greatly among conscious life, but we share the same fundamental processes and patterns. Dolphins and bats make sense of the shape of their worlds through echolocation. While humans can hear sound waves, we primarily use vision to detect light and make sense of the shape of our world. The endless variety of these sensory configurations infers the existence of multiple perceptual, conscious realities. 

This world-map we create in our minds reflects the actual, physical world, but imperfectly, because of the emphasis our species places on certain senses like vision. Every animal’s body is a different instrument tuned to pick up different frequencies and signals in our environment, and they each create different sounds in response. But all instruments are more similar than they are different. There are roughly three types of instruments: percussion that you strike or scrape or shake; stringed that you pluck or bow; and wind that you blow. Think of all the infinite sound combinations that are possible with just three fundamental processes.

We also create an emotional world-map, our mindscape or psyche, that forms from our individual emotional experiences of beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The world we see and experience immediately surrounding us reflects this inner landscape, not perfectly, not in a 1:1 sense, but energetically, with synchronicities and correspondences. As within, so without. 

We can create subtle shifts in our environment by changing the perspective, mindset, and attitude from which we view it. This is the theory behind any attempt to change one’s beliefs, actions, or feelings. Many therapies are based around this concept: that we can change our lives and how we experience things that happen to us by changing our mind. 

Holding guilt and offering shallow apologies don’t solve problems. But changing your thoughts and your behavior can. It is difficult, and requires discomfort, consistency, focus, and energy. But it is not impossible. People do it all the time.

By consistently tuning our intuition and values to harmonize with our conscious actions and sensory perceptions in the physical world, we begin to change the way we see and act. In so doing, we also change how others might react to and experience us—we alter our ripple effects.

6

The future is always uncertain. The immediate present moment is our only guarantee. Our first task is to accept that and surrender, relax into the chaos. Stop struggling against every shadow that forms and nests within you, and instead invite the shadows to tea. Talk things out. Get to know them. When you work at making peace with your shadows, over time the pathways they were blocking will clear, and new portals will reveal themselves. 

Beware: like in earth, in the mind there is nothing lost, only buried. When something is forgotten or ignored, it settles its roots below the mind, into the arcane deep of the body, the gut, the muscles, the flesh of being. 

Here in the flesh, verbal language no longer reigns supreme. The language of the body, of the senses, of the blood and bones and gut, is the wordless language we share with all bodies. Often without even realizing, we float along the stream of consciousness while a whole ocean extends deep beneath us, full of images, feelings, patterns, sensations, knowingness in ways we cannot ever fully know. The language of the body is more powerful and more fundamentally true than any language of letters or numbers. 

7 

The traditional definition of divination involves predicting the future. I propose a new definition rooted in the now:

Divination: 

1) to make space for creative and imaginative possibilities; 

2) to use the power of imagination (storytelling, metaphor, mythmaking, poetry, drawing) to create a possible future in the present moment.

Entire worlds can be created and destroyed in a single moment. 

Divining requires full participation with your psyche, which requires practice. Become aware of the stream of thoughts in your mind through reflective practices such as meditation, breathwork, journaling, or simply ruminating. Divining requires using intuition, a sense many of us have lost touch with. That is okay, we will get curious and learn together. 

Divine new possibilities, both real and imaginary. A thing and an idea coexisting. Visual spells of wondrous things, all made of earth. 

There is no going back. Only a moving forward, a joining, a re-belonging, a re-familiarizing. Our connection to earth is in our blood, bones, guts, and deep in our insula and amygdala. To rekindle the romance, we must temporarily leave behind our frontal lobe processing. Leave behind ideas of what is logical and rational. Forget what “seems silly” or “makes no sense.” Forget logical sense and remember your other senses: pain, fear, peace, wonder, ecstasy. Walk deeper into the forest. 

Until we stop seeing ourselves as better-than or more-than or different-than our fellow beings, we will be stuck. 

Until we surrender to the grief that has settled deep in the caverns of our bodies, we will be stuck. 

Until we can see our shadow selves, have tea with the forest creatures of our minds, and thrust our hands right into that sticky black, we will be stuck. 

It doesn’t matter whether you live in the city or in the country; you’re living on and inside rock and dirt and metal. The land is the hand that feeds; you are the mouth that eats. 

8

We face unprecedented challenges on a global scale. Air and water pollution threaten our health and the existence of many species of animals and plants. The climate crisis is wreaking havoc on our weather systems and introducing instability in ecosystems around the world, leading to massive changes that are accelerating at a pace we can hardly keep up with and may very likely reach a crucial turning point in my lifetime. Human activity and development cause natural habitat loss. The sixth mass extinction is well underway. Some scientific estimates say 150-200 species of plant, insect, birds, and mammals go extinct every day. This is 1000x the natural “background” rate of species extinction. This extinction rate is faster than anything earth—our home—has experienced in 65 million years, since the dinosaurs vanished. Changing chemistry in our oceans due to rising global temperature is poisoning our coral reefs. Massive dead zones created from plastic pollution swirl throughout our oceans in clusters the size of countries. Unstable coastal algal blooms proliferate and suffocate all life below. 

Climate change produces accelerating and unpredictable effects. We don’t know exactly what or when these various predicted effects will occur, but we do know it’s already happening. Despite an earth abundant with natural resources, human suffering tied to the illusion of resource scarcity affects billions of individuals every day. The mindless consumption and greed of the few is leading to the same scarcity the hoarders feared.

While it is difficult to accurately measure deforestation rates, one thing is abundantly clear: our forests are endangered. Somewhere between 7% and 25% of primary, or “old-growth” forests remain in the United States due to aggressive logging, urban development, and clear-cutting for agriculture, specifically livestock production. Climate change disrupts forest habitat and hinders forest stress resilience, meaning forests are less able to recover from extreme events such as fires and disease, which are in turn an increasingly common effect of global climatic turbulence.

With less forest cover overall, and much less old-growth forest, we have lost touch with the forest as a society. Indigenous communities have been speaking up and protecting the land for hundreds of years, yet colonial and imperial and cultural forces have committed every atrocious act imaginable against these communities. The U.S. government’s violence toward Indigenous tribes and black and brown communities is the apotheosis of white supremacy’s essential severance from empathy, compassion, and reverence for all life.

The end of the forest is where we are right now: looking ahead to the indeterminate effects of climate change, industrial pollution, extractive industries, species extinction, continued racism, religious injustice, militaristic authoritarian autocracies. Looking back on society’s long and troubled shadows. We stand at the edge of time and turn around to admire modernity’s achievement and what do we see? 

Here is what I see: a deforestation of the psyche. A growing chasm on the level of the body and spirit, between us and others, us and the forest, us and earth/soil/shadow. Anxiety, depression, and discontent. Striving forward into no-place, dissociating from the present presence. We’ve come a long way, but we’re itching for something lost. What is it that you’re itching for? What is it you really desire? Forget sense, forget logic for a moment. What will you offer? 

I remind myself of how I can feel belonging in a world that also feels chaotic and destructive. Each spell a sapling for the reforestation of the psyche. The magic here is observing, attending to, and participating in the symphony that is the more-than-human, more-than-self world that is at our fingertips at all moments. 

9

We fold into shadow, unfurl into light.

Grief is the shadow of missing and longing for something that has slipped out of light and into another dimension beyond the material. This shadowed forest—the endless forest of our minds—is where the people we love go when they die. It is where our memories live, the good ones and the bad ones. It is where we dream and imagine. 

Things and places created in imagination are real, even if not material. We create the world we want by creating things we dream. Architects have to imagine a building before it is built, not just any hazy imagining, but a highly specific imaginary stand-in for the potentially material thing. They sketch it out, many times. They make measurements. They assess. Then they get others to help build it. With raw materials from the earth, transformed into building materials, a building that was previously simply an idea, comes into material being. 

Our lives are like this, too. We have the creative power to imagine and then create the world immediately surrounding us. To raise children and build families, to make jokes and inspire laughter, to make music and inspire joy, to organize marches and inspire political change, to attend religious or devotional services and inspire reverence, to make love and inspire desire, to build friendships and inspire loyalty, to learn new languages and develop new skills, to read stories, to build things, to start businesses, to farm vegetables, to imagine monsters, to imagine the heroes who will slay the monsters, and so on.

We are full of creative, imaginative powers and skills, but too often we shush them as illogical, childish fancies. But with practice, we can nurture these skills and create real things from our imaginations. We can dream them alive. 

Curiosity is essential. 

Questions reveal a path. 

The ask and answer, the call and response of songbirds.  

What is your offering?

Metamorphosis. Metaphor-phosis. Through metaphor, a thing is transformed. 

Carving space, little by little, to unfurl ourselves moment by moment into the business of being attuned, of witnessing, of living. 

Living is breathing, a cycle of inhales and exhales. We must breathe in, absorb, create space, invite in, say yes. But we cannot live by only taking in, consuming, and expanding. We must also exhale, contract, push away, say no. 

I invite you to create space at your edges for expansion. Expand into earth on the inhale, fold into the shadow on the exhale. 

Fold into shadow, unfurl into light.