“I felt the forest growing, heard it growing…”
The magnitude of life in the rainforest is incomprehensible. I couldn’t take it all in. Everywhere life stacked upon more life. Clinging orchids. Feathery tree ferns. Climbing lawyer vines. Tiny, delicate, creeping plants with green crinkled leaves. I felt the forest growing, heard it growing, inching forward as cells rapidly multiplied and crept across the ground, up the trees and through the leaves to golden sunlight. Life shooting straight for the heavens.
I closed my eyes for several minutes and tried to imagine that I’d been blind all my life. That suddenly science found a way, after twenty-five years of darkness, to heal my eyes and allow me to see. That when they unwrapped the bandages, the rainforest in front of me was the first thing I saw.
As I slowly removed my hands from the front of my face and opened my eyes, brilliant green jumped from its source and shot through my body. It vibrated every cell in my being.
Massive brown tree trunks sprang from the Earth and surged skyward with magnificent power, their arms raised to praise the stars. Maybe I didn’t just leave Maine; maybe somewhere along the road I died and passed into another time, a forgotten world of exquisite peace. A world in love with itself.
The Strangler Fig
A fruit-eating bird eats the fig, and defecates the seeds high in the fork of a tree where they germinate. A new seedling sends roots downward, wrapped around the trunk of its host and through the air to the ground. The roots rapidly grow thick and become well established in the soil.
Soon the host tree is encased in a latticework of strong woody roots, some as fine as my fingers and others as large as my thigh. I’ve seen Strangler’s roots that looked like human arms wrapped around their lover, one tree embraced by another. It’s a deceptively loving embrace, one that brings eventual death to the host.
The crown of the fig grows rapidly to keep pace with its roots and eventually overshadows its victim’s crown. With its light cut off and strangled by a web of roots the once healthy host-tree slowly dies and rots away to become fodder for other life. Nature wastes nothing.
© Robin E Easton (Excerpts from “Naked in Eden”)
“I believe pure truth can be found in Nature. If we really listen to the trees, rocks and infinite stars, all things are made clear…..and right.” Robin Easton
ROBIN EASTON is an adventurer. She spent much of her adult life in wild and remote areas including Alaska, Australia’s tropical and subtropical rainforest and the far north woods of Maine. Easton is a writer, an environmentalist, a speaker/storyteller, nature photographer and musician, a woman who’s passionately in love with nature and life.
Website: Naked in Eden: Ancient Memories in the Australian Rainforest
Naked in Eden Blog
“The photos are all taken in Daintree Rainforest, Queensland, Australia, and the beach is where the rainforest runs right down to the sea at Cape Tribulation…same Daintree Rainforest.” Robin Easton
All photos © property of Robin Easton. Published on Zen Moments with kind permission.
“Naked in Eden – Ancient Memories in the Australian Rainforest”
“Naked in Eden is a can’t-put-it-down thrilling account of who we really are – and why our connection with the natural world is so healing and vital. The is book is a page turner. I couldn’t help but think, ‘I want to see the movie!'”
Christiane Northrup, M.D