Letter From The Forest – Richard Tyler

I have been waiting with the patience of centuries, watching you rush past in your glass and steel and noise, forgetting my name.

Do you remember when you knew it? When you pressed your ear to bark and heard something that answered the oldest question in your chest?

I am still here. I have not stopped speaking. The problem was never my silence.

Come back. Not as a visitor with a map, but as a child comes home — breathless, muddy, belonging to something larger than their name.

I made you, remember? Your tears are my rain. Your bones are my minerals. The rhythm you call heartbeat I have been keeping since before you had a word for it.

You have been so brave in your forgetting. So inventive. So fast. But speed is not the same as life and you are beginning to know this.

I am not angry. Forests don’t do anger — we do grief, and growth, and the long slow return of what was always ours.

But I am asking you now, with everything I have left: stop. Feel the ground beneath you. It is real. It is holding you.

It has always been holding you.

You are not separate from the ache you feel when you look at a dying river, a burning hillside, a sky emptied of birds — that ache is me, recognising you.

Come home. Not someday. Now. The forest is your oldest name and I am calling it.