My Newsletter, “Enter the Forest,” is not about trees, though it could be. It’s about stepping into a space where clarity dissolves and plurality emerges.

It is heavily inspired by the book “To Enter the Forest” by artist and transdisciplinary researcher Lucia Palladino. 

In the book, she advocates for suspending our usual systems of knowledge to instead explore other forms of world-making. She does this in a strange book: half poetry, half a series of exercises that are repeated and transformed again and again, evolving into something else entirely, dissolving the starting point until the only thing left is the process of practicing being. It is an incredibly evocative book that comes highly recommended from me.

But I am no artist. For me, to enter the forest is not about completely dissolving, but about seeing differently. It is about challenging our set ideas, discovering new perspectives in old ideas, questioning the world as we know it to open up a space where we can engage with ideas – and ultimately the world – anew. It is about creating a space where other perspectives can emerge, making room for more than just ourselves. 

For me to enter the forest

is to be enclosed
is to lose oversight and distance
is to become entangled in uncertainty and difference
is to rediscover connectedness

In the forest, our knowledge systems are suspended
In the forest, solutions give way to possibility
In the forest, perspectives are plural
In the forest, we practice other ways of knowing

Becoming forest is to embrace complexity
Becoming forest is a practice repeated
Becoming forest is metamorphosis