You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

by Ada Limon

REDWOODS The first time I entered a forest I saw the trees, of course, huddled together in rings, thin veils of mist between their branches, some dead but still standing, or fallen thigh bones on the desiccated floor, but I also saw the great buttery platters of fungus climbing like stepping stones up their shaggy trunks: tzadee, tzadee, tzadee, each a different size: small to large or large to small, as if some rogue architect had been cocky enough to install them on the stunned trees’ northern sides, leading up to the balcony of their one ton boughs. I was here to investigate my place among them, these giants, 3000 years old, still here, living in my lifetime. I should have felt small, a mere human—petty in my clumsy boots, burrs in my socks, while these trees held a glossary of stars in their crowns, their heads up there in the croissant-shaped clouds, the wisdom of the ages flowing up through from root to branchlet— though rather I felt large inside my life, the sum of Jung’s archetypes: the self, the shadow, the anima, the persona of my personhood fully recognized and finally accepted, the nugget of my being, my shadow of plush light. I felt like I was climbing up those fungal discs toward something endless, beyond my birth and death, into my here-ness and now-ness, the scent and silence overwhelming me, seeping back into my pores. You had to have been there to know such joy, fear intermingled, my limbs tingling: ancient, mute.