Just a peek

I've mentioned Mythago Wood on several occasions as a book which has had, and continues to have, a huge influence on my interpretation and interactions with woodland. Mythago Wood is the first book in the Mythago Cycle of novels, followed by Lavondyss. In Lavondyss the main protagonist Tallis is the younger sister of a character from Mythago Wood, who at the end of the book was lost in the Wood. In short, Tallis carves a series of wooden masks through which she can see the wood through time and space and with them travel to those different places and times. For some reason gateways have always held a strange significance for me, and although I understand the books are fiction, I also understand truths can be found in surprising places, as I've frequently found. I've always enjoyed walking between paired trees, I still do, wondering, possibly hoping (I say 'possibly hoping', I definitely *am* hoping) that I'll find myself in another manifestation of the world, a changed world. I know, I'm a total fantasist, what the hey. At the bottom of Glastonbury Tor there used to be a cleaved tree with a path through it, I would always approach the Tor through it, it took on a ceremonial meaning for me, a transition into the sacred. I was saddened when over time one side inevitably succumbed to the time and the elements and fell. Anyway, I digress. Since reading Lavondyss I can't pass a tree with a hole through it without peering through in the hope of seeing that changed alternative reality. And, although I haven't seen it yet, it doesn't mean that I wont. I want to believe.