Habituation

Tammimäki is more than an oakwood on a wee hill as its name implies. More than a once-upon-a-time island in Mynämäki in south west Finland: part then of a still existing archipelago. It creeps up on me in the dark, sleeping in bed. It gets into the bed and lies down beside me. It's a state of mind - inserted somewhere between wakefulness of the small hours and night dreams. But then again, it's also daylight reverie.

But for the moment it's night. I navigate my way into the wood, careful not to step on the slender illuminated yearlings and saplings that somehow here seem to have escaped Oak Change and the fungus which helped the crisis along the way. I feel rather than see the elder and ancient trees around me. It's a small wood, with 35 or 36 such trees, five hundred and four hundred years in age, the oldest generation. They're all broken-limbed, wind-torn, leafless now, moon lighting the fabric of old wooden bone systems.

If I were to feel that there is a measure of acceptance now, cutting both ways, it would not be any form of anthropomorphism: rather a simple acknowledgement of fact. Sentient creatures are precisely that.

It's taken a long time to reach this point. I've slipped in and out of the wood for weeks. I've gratefully accepted, according to season, the mushrooms, the berries, the seeds and acorns the woodland produces; not for me or the deer, but for its own systemic purposes, its own continuing sustenance and existence. In the same way my body produces blood, but it's not for the benefit of mosquitoes.

I walk steadily and slowly round an inner meandering path of my own devising, assuring myself that each tree is in its rightful place, that each erratic boulder is in the place it found itself at the tongue of the last gacier. I step carefully over the fallen trees and round the raspberry tangles; more than once. And more than once realising that this is more than a vagary.

It's a dream; not because I'm asleep, which I'm not (though I'm not awake) but because the oaks are there at all. I'm visited now by these trees, just as I have visited for these months. It's a reverie not of my making, but one determined by my constant walking, by continued absorption - a word I use deliberately - of the woods and its internal structures and relationships, of which I am now a temporary part.

Sooner, perhaps rather than later, I'll pass along elsewhere in a way the oaks cannot, but part of me, the woodland flaneur, will always linger now in that small wood at the edge of the mainland on the Baltic; just as the oaks' wood, presence, timespan, timescale, has become a state of mind for me. Habituation. True dwelling. And it's here now in this very world and all its suffering.