Atlantic Rainforest
Atlantic Rainforest, Brazil
2026
The quiet and apparent silence is almost a hoax. As if it would try and convince you there's nothing there to be witnessed. So go along. Don't linger. But if you do and you manage to refrain from a most anxious gut feeling to simply leave, you'll be greeted by a presence you can't deny. It's there and in its greatness you find yourself allowed without even being acknowledged.
In some ways, if you listen well enough and pay attention wholeheartedly you come to realise it's not only a sum of all its parts. It's not simply an amalgamation of the living beings it contains. You can almost touch the feeling, the weight of its life, as if you could only understand its intention. But there is nothing to grasp. There is nothing to be said.
But attention is a fickle thing. Soon you find yourself noticing that even light itself doesn’t command the day. It fights through branches and leaves to find its way to a half-submerged branch in the river and there you notice a little bird. That gives you pause. Another life, another being and yet it doesn’t impose its existence, it’s just there and it’s enough.
You go deeper. In search of something? Go on, come in, deeper. Your presence is a disturbance, you think. Unwittingly you look for another sign of life, as if needed. You wade through. You push farther. The vegetation, an obstacle to movement; the canopy, an obstacle to orientation. Is this what the Conquistadores faced? You close your eyes and hear the loudness within the silence.
Now, eyes wide open, you see right there - the sign of life, unquestionably. To whom? And that question is what remains as you decide to go back. Yes, don’t linger.
