The Enchanted Forest

A poem to welcome the week

Ancestral return: In Erro, Spain, on the Camino de Santiago, May 31, 2023.

The memory of the ancient forests in inside me,

burning through time,

wild fire of love.

The lines above are from my poem book, dated November 23, 2024.

Two months later, I wrote the poem I’m about to share with you. This one arrived at a time when I was missing a fundamental part of myself, the part that loves - and is loved by - a partner. ‘Missing’ is too polite a word here; ‘yearning’ comes closer but that’s not right, either. It was more like the ache for an experience I knew was part of me, but I hadn’t embodied yet.

They say that what you focus on grows, and I’d spent years under the spell of this void, so that the dearth of love grew monstrous – a stain that spread across my inner life and made showing up for ‘outer’ life a challenge. I’m forever grateful to the family and friends who held my hand throughout this Camino of sorrow.

For medicine, one summer’s day, the Author of Love prescribed this poem, which rushed like a river through my purple pen into my notebook. It arrived, to my surprise, in Spanish, and its themes of an enchanted forest hark back to my love of childhood books such as The Enchanted Wood by Enid Blyton and Lord of the Forest by the enigmatic ‘BB’. Books that became sanctuary for a sensitive child ever scanning for the subtlest shift in the soil of the adults around her.

When I walked the Camino de Santiago in 2023, I felt the beech trees bend their lovely boughs to me in greeting. Welcome home to Spain, they whispered, as I stepped wide-eyed into Roncesvalles, trailing a caravan of spectral ancestors, on that first long and brutal day following the Pyrenees ascent.

Later, the fairytale forests of my ancestral Galicia entranced me; I wove through them as if in an emerald dream. Oak. Chestnut. Eucalypt. Of course, in fairytales, the forest symbolises a place of danger and transformation - a threshold where the heroine crosses from one life into another. But first she must traverse the dim, leaf-dappled unknown.

In Arzua, on my second Camino in 2024.

For me, this shadowy path spanned five years, with the Camino as a central fork in the road, and I could never have imagined where it would lead. Mystery is always alive in the fairytale forest. In Blyton’s tales, the children never knew which world they’d encounter at the top of the Faraway Tree…

Today, as our world feels desperately heavy, and many of us mourn the dearth of love in the collective experience, I offer you this love song of hope from the forest of my soul. A year on from writing it, I can see how it promised a crossing into the sunshine of a new life.

After the dim, leaf-dappled unknown, the light.

Sarria, Galicia, on the Camino de Santiago in 2023.

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English translation follows, with the original Spanish beneath it.

El Bosque Encantado (The Enchanted Forest)

There’s an enchanted forest in the soil of my soul
An enchanted forest, though my eyes may not behold

From here - where the whole of Heaven,
Endlessly blue,
Wraps me in shawl of a new life -

I hear the oaks singing
In voices woven of sunlight and innocence,
They sing in the green of ancient lifetimes,
Of centuries gone that wander on, eternal

This day -
Past and future braided into the now,
A silken ribbon trembling through the heavens;
Life, robed in love,
Love – well of life

Of these mysteries and more
Sing the oaks, the chestnuts,
In the enchanted forest - my nest, untouched by harm,
My home,
A mirror of consciousness
Hidden in a quiet chamber of my being

From here, across the oceans, I sing to you,
I answer your call -
My forests - my soul resounds within this song,
Telling you of my gratitude,
Of the tenderness that gathers in me
When I remember your colours -
Your light and your shadow,
Your whispers, your vast silences

And the secret gift
Hidden along your sacred Path -
Blessed by the weeping of centuries,
The pilgrim’s tears rising as a hymn to God

Arms open to the clouds,
Receiving the baptism of rain,
Giving thanks for the sun,
Receiving bread and wine
As night descends upon the Way

And the enchanted forest
Opens its arms
And in a voice of emerald leaves
Whispers:

“Rest.”

El Bosque Encantado

Hay un bosque encantado en la tierra de mi ser.
Hay un bosque encantado, aunque no lo pueda ver.

Desde acá, donde el cielo entero,
celeste sin fin,
me envuelve en una vida nueva,

en el bosque encantado los robles cantan,
en voces hechas de sol y de pureza.
Cantan en el verde de vidas antiguas,
en siglos pasados que todavía caminan, eternos.

Este día—
pasado y futuro abrazados en el presente,
una cinta de seda que aletea en el firmamento;
vida, vestida de amor,
amor, fuente de toda vida.

De esto y de tanto más
cantan los robles y los castaños
en el bosque encantado—nido mío, nido sin mal,
hogar,
espejo de conciencia,
en un rincón profundo de mi ser.

Desde acá, cruzando los mares, te canto,
te respondo,
bosques míos—mi alma suena en este canto,
y te habla de mi gratitud,
y de la paz que me enternece
cuando recuerdo tus colores,
tu luz y tu sombra,
tus susurros y tus silencios,

y ese regalo escondido en tu Camino hermoso,
Camino bendecido por los llantos de los siglos,
llantos de peregrinos cantándole a Dios,
con los brazos abiertos a las nubes,
recibiendo el bautismo de la lluvia,
agradeciendo el sol,
recibiendo el pan y el vino cuando cae la noche
sobre el Camino.

Y el bosque encantado
me abre sus brazos,
y en voz de hojas esmeralda susurra:

“Descansá”.