The call of the forest

Certain words resonate from within like ancient echoes, ancestral reminiscences: ‘forest’ is one of them. A forest is not only a group of trees, a blossoming ecosystem, a green lung; it is also a deep world of imagination and memory, a cultural matrix, a frontier between the familiar and the unknown, a sanctuary of otherness. Its ‘call’ cannot therefore be reduced to a simple invitation to delve into nature; it is a ‘call back’, in the strongest sense, towards the original link between the human and the tree world, a link that is as symbolic and philosophical as it is material. For, after all, does the French world ‘sauvage’ (wild), not stem from the Latin silva, meaning forest.