The Dark Forest.
Old notes from a farmhouse winter, found two years later – more questions than answers then, and the dark forest now beckoning.
Two years sit between the notebook and the woman reading it. The pages hold a mind-map with "I" at the center – family, work, friends, travels, hobbies – and around it the state she was in when she drew it: more questions than answers, self-denial, fears by the cartload, no idea where to go.
Finding old notes is a practice nobody schedules, and it measures what daily life hides: some things answered, some settled, some still in process – and the forest itself changed character. Not conquered, not mapped: the dark forest is no longer frightening; it beckons. Fear and Control describes the same turn from inside the mechanism – fear loosens not when the path is fully lit, but when you stop needing it to be.
That is what walking a way looks like from two years further on: the questions don't all close. The wood stops being dark.
Two years ago I was sitting in a small wooden house with a stove, in a farming village in Switzerland – back then my husband was just introducing me to other sides of spiritual practice.
That's when, right in the moment, I made these notes. There were more questions than answers – self-denial, fears by the cartload, and no understanding of where to go at all. Completely by chance I found them now, and I realized that over this time I've found answers, resolved or settled some things, am still in process with others – but that dark forest is no longer dark and frightening. It's more like inviting, beckoning.
By the way, this is another #practice. Pick something you don't know about yourself, would like to change, can't find an answer to. And we'll try to help you.
Thank you for reading.
If her words reached somewhere mine don't – good. That's what this blog is for. Take what fits and leave the rest.
– Jan