TRUE INHABITANTS. CASI QUINTERO.

TRUE INHABITANTS

Forests need true inhabitants. Everyone can walk among the trees in a forest, but not everyone is able to actually enter the forest. This does not mean that there are those who do not deserve it. It only means that to return to a state where, for example, we appreciate oxygen as the breath of green leaves, it is neither an easy road nor presented to the naked eye. Only the real forest inhabitants can lead you to that state. This is a very good start: realize how important it is to find a true inhabitant of the woods who is around you. The second step is to identify them. Maybe you are one of them, but you do not know yet …

So, now let’s understand why this is so important … This is so important because, thanks to them, you can go back to the forest. But perhaps, at this point, you have to stop and allow yourself to find out, on your own, and even if this is the right time, the reason why it is so important for you to come back into the woods again. Try to find out.

Meanwhile, I present you with a lot of them, true forest inhabitants, because that’s the best way I can to help you understand how they are and how you can identify one…

CASI QUINTERO

In order to be able to speak of Casi we need to return to certain words their simplest meaning and free them from maniqueisms, added connotations and intentional interpretations. She came to me seeking, without success, a member of my family, from which she retained the memory and the sense of broken friendship. She was an absolute stranger to me, and I was to her. A message for another person. A parallel story, with no apparent points of connection. Barely present, quiet and silent.

Same as the forest when you enter it. You are both the forest and you, two strangers. Who comes to whom does not matter, the process is always the same. Everything is motionless. Nothing happens. In front of you only the apparent and known signs, almost like a still photo. The vacuum in which events can be tuned in. And as soon as you stop and enter into the static and latent rhythm of the forest, the forest begins to manifest in front of you, around you, above you. Insects run through you, like through a piece of moss, and your senses run through the forest, interlacing your fingers with it.

Casi came as a distant voice, colorless and timid. A voice that was silent more than it spoke. Until it began to show his photosynthetic reality. That of a voice that crossed the forests of La Palma without being noticed, as do the real inhabitants of their canopies.

Now Forestta is full of her pine forests, her laurasilva and her dragos, among others. Without anyone asking her anything, she fed us and feeds on the endless chlorophylls of the Caldera de Taburiente, Cubo de la Galga and a hundred and more corners.

“… on the island where I live, LA PALMA, one of the things that caught my attention is that the PINES CANARIOS have the quality of being able to recover from a fire, that is, that the bark protects them in a way that, although all the branches have been burned, the tree is still alive and reddens again in a short time.

caldera-de-taburiente — Caldera de Taburiente

This attracts me, surely, because it is like a triumph of a living being over death, because there is a relation with the myth of the Phoenix bird, which is reborn from its ashes …”

caldera_de_taburiente_la_palma — Caldera de Taburiente

“On the other hand, LAURISILVA, which is what remains of the forests of the Tertiary Age of the Jurassic that inhabited all Europe until the time of the glaciations.”

senderistas-en-los-tilos-laurisilva — Los Tilos

“It is characterized by being a moist forest where the fogs condense, getting trapped in the vegetation. This attracts me to be a memory of such an ancestral times …”

“And, finally, something very special are also the DRAGOS, very long-lived trees, which grow very slowly and have very strange ramifications.”

His voice always carried the green of oxygen but I could not always see it. But now Forestta is covered with moss under her breath, and the forest grows and grows denser, deeper, wider.