THE OTHER SIDE My grandparents went down to the woods on the day I was born, and blessed an infant tree they found, naming it as my guardian twin. Throughout my childhood I never knew I was bound to something wild, that I grew through frost and winter storms, raising many arms to distant light. Until one day, when school was over, and grandma took me into the woods. She said a time of change had come, that I was turning into a man. We met grandpa working there, splitting a rooted tree with a curved iron blade. They stripped me naked, pulled the split apart and gently pushed me through and splashed cold water over me, then bound the tree shut with white rags and told me childhood was left behind forever, on the other side. I stayed near the tree a lot at first, feeling abandoned and out of place, thinking about the time ahead. The tree healed, its bandages rotted away, and it became like other trees, except its bark was scarred for me. Then I met a girl, and went away for years. But I never forgot, and always returned at the great moments of my life - times of grief or celebration, and felt a special union with the other side. Once there was a year when things got so dark I wanted to open the tree again and go back through, but felt in my bones that unless the slit was exactly the same I was sure to end up in some other place. Now that I am very old and another change is near. I often visit my guardian tree. How massive it's become these recent years, joined at last to the sky above. Soon I will enter my heart's house and lock the door behind. I'll climb the creaky forest stairs, and slip through the gap where the light seeds the complex silence on the other side. -- Roderick Ford, from the U. S., published widely in the U. S. and Europe -- from "Seeing the Wood and the Trees," eds. Rowley & Haughton, Cairde na Coille - Forest Friends Ireland/Rowan Tree Press (2003)