Every morning at dawn I get to walk into the forest. I consider it my home, my primal territory. My name is Guido and I am its warden. Years ago, I fled the city. In the uncontaminated nature, I get in touch with my purest temper. I have ignored this call for such a long time. Too much self-destruction, too much waste. 

My father craved to live into nature, although after his father’s death, something snapped inside of him. Mental illness dragged him away from us. He had a bipolar disorder, and besides he was schizophrenic, abusive and unpredictable. In order to protect us, my mother took us away from him. My childhood was an endless flight, a void hard to name. 

For years there was only silence. Until I got to know he was on his deathbed. Drugs wore his body out, lithium had eroded his vital organs, and Parkinson’s disease did what was left. And yet, the most vivid memory I still have of him belongs to a clear place: the forest. 

He used to take me in the forest close to his country house.  He looked oddly at ease, there, as if the trees could calm down the noise and demons dwelling in him. Those walks were our language, our way to talk. Unaware of it, he was showing me a way, a path towards healing. Long time after that, I came back to that very forest. I was trying to understand why I needed it so badly. I may have been trying to understand my father, with a help from the trees. They crack, fall and bend under the wind, as well: they are as out of control and restless as he was. I fled from the city many times. The noise and the lights made me feel far from my disposition, like an animal that lost its track. I did feel the need for a simpler life. The need for a return to a concrete life. 

Our breath changes in the woods. The body becomes quiet. While walking, I often feel like something is going back to its place, as if the body recalled a much older memory than I actually am. 

Every day plants teach me something. They grow in search for light. They bend, adapt, and yet they never stop following their own direction. Animals follow their instinct and never forget who they are. I do recognize a form of liberty in this.

Sometimes, among the branches, the light rests in an unexpected way. I think Nature is a bridge between what remains and what keeps going, between those who are not there anymore and those who still have to come. 

Oh Victoria, and then there you came. With you, it has been like recognizing before starting to talk to each other. I asked you for trust, then I invited you to follow me. That way, a universe completely ours was born here, slowly and bravely built up. 

And eventually Rumi appeared, our love. His birth changed meaning to everything. Once I used to enter the forest to heal my wounds, and now I enter it to imagine his future. 

Rumi, I wish you could start to know the world from here. From the wind through the leaves. From the smell of the soil after the rain. From the silence at dawn. From the birds’ melodies. From the age old oaks’ patience. I wish your first education were a sense of wonder. I wish I could offer you a different space. A place where you could preserve your wilder part, where you could imagine without any fear, and where you could keep looking at the world as if it were something mysterious and boundless. 

I wish you could keep believing that the trees would guard stories. That the moss and the rocks would preserve the memory of the rain. That the light through the branches could still look like a sort of presence. Since it is from that very ability to wonder that a sense of respect for any form of life can be born.

Being a father, for me, has this meaning, too. To transform a wound into a root, something fertile. Without wishing to, I will also leave you a forest.Every morning, at dawn, we enter the forest together. In order for you to discover, and for me to remember.

In this quiet place I feel a sense of possibility grow. Lay down, close your eyes. A future is waiting for us. Dear forest, there we are.