Becoming 

Heat. The heat of the sun that afternoon scorched my back as I surveyed the meadow. In the furthest corner, obscured by the low gracing birch and hawthorn brambles, was a shadow, a blackness against the verdant green. The size of a small child it was impossible to decipher in the bright sunlight what or who it was.

Curious but cautious yet compelled to investigate, I walked slowly barefoot across the delicate blanket of blush coloured clover, serenaded by the crickets. Surely their chorus meant there was nothing to fear.

As I drew closer the contour of the shape shifted, reforming to resemble what looked like a door. A tiny door too small for even Alice to squeeze through. As my eyes adjusted to the increasing shade, I noticed the door was ajar. No indication of where it might lead other than into the forest itself, I stepped closer. This portal beckoned me, a threshold to the unknown yet so familiar. There was an inevitability of me passing through this gateway. I had no power to resist. 

Crawling and clawing across the ground, it felt more like dragging, as I wrestled with the compulsion to explore while the anchors of fear pulled heavily on my feet. I wished to grow enormously small.  As the sharp stones, twigs and brambles marked and punctured my skin, I squeezed through the borrower’s door.

Cool. Everything in the forest is exactly as it seems. As I stand, the canopy envelopes me, a shiver of anticipation trembling through my body. The forest will swallow me up. Once inside I must stay until it lets me out again. My dark pupils widen, and I taste the bitter sting of earth on my tongue and the rich, damp musk of the moss lingering on the breeze.  

I reach down and search for the gritty, smooth surface of the charred willow, lining up the various thickness one by one. Like medical instruments they await the procedure, but this one will lose all order and control. As with the knife, these tools of contradiction can carve with tenderness and beauty but with a slight of hand obliterate and destroy.

I dig. These flimsy implements snapping and reducing to powder, as I scrape at the surface. As blind as the mole feeling her way with trust and instinct, I go deeper and deeper, finding a moment of clarity before aIl is erased.  The only purpose is to feel the in-between; the damp soil, the roots, the worms and beetles chasing across my fingers, as my sole connects to the earth. I dig; I search. There are no clues to guide me out. I’m lost but know exactly where I am. I am becoming.

Sally Minns 2025