Speaker 1: Hey, when it comes to podcasts listening, are you like me?
I mean, it's like television surfing. You're like all over
the place looking for that one thing that you can
add to your moment of now. Be it forest stories,
be it rockstar stories, talking with a chef, whatever you're
looking for. That's what ero dot net is all about.
Arrooe dot net. The searching is over. It's all in
one place. Enjoy the exploration. Hey, thanks for being a
part of the conversation. Welcome to Forest Stories, a series
of short winded adventures within a collection of skyscraping trees,
stuck feet first and Georgia Clay right here in Carolina.
It's been a huge part of my daily journey for
over thirty three years. I Am the Poet in the Forest,
a children's series written and recorded in the nineteen nineties.
It's grown into multiple podcasts that now reach around the world,
and none of it would be possible without this forest
right here in South Charlotte, North Carolina, at the base
of Heartbreak Hills. It's a sign that reads Rainbow Forest. Well,
it's time you get to meet what's inspired several generations
long before the paved paths decorated with colorful homes colonized
around this beautiful lake, slow moving stream, flatland swamps, and
array of natural animals. There were families and business owners
who are said to have raised into this area for
the beauty of the land, wild roses, migratory birds, and
wild grapevines. Those before me either forgot to write about
it or it's buried somewhere inside their family tree. Hey,
thanks for being a part of the conversation.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to the forest. Sunshine twenty four degrees, This
forest his ice cold. I've written about these cold temperatures
for so many years, thirty three to be exact, because
that's how long I've been in this forest. Because it
feels like that, even though they say that we've got
climate control issues on this planet. Yeah, how come you're
not walking with me in this forest right now? I mean,
I'm looking at this beautiful lake. It's just so still.
It's almost like a saying, don't move. We're all cold.
We don't want to do anything but just sit here.
In fact, I can see layers of ice starting to
build up. When it's that cold, it doesn't take that
long to put the ice up on top. No birds
in the sky today, I don't see any squirrels. I
just see the leaves doing what leaves do. In fact,
one just fell in front of me, and it's that dance.
I always call it the final dance. I once wrote
and produced a song that was called the Final Dance
that was heavily, heavily, heavily inspired by the falling of
a leaf. And then I began to think that here's
this situation where every year nature gives us this opportunity
to learn some things about our everyday world. And part
of that process is understanding what that final dance is.
And it can be a human form, it can be
something that you've done with your pets. It's that final dance.
I don't mean that as a negative, because I don't
believe that when you put leaves inside the ground, or
you allow them to be on the forest floor, that's
a negative. That is a giving tree to a soil
that needs the nutrients, to the animals that need these
leaves to build their homes. Hey, let me go up
here on this tree right now and knock on the
front door of this squirrel and ask him, can I
get my leaves back? That was part of my tree?
That gave me some sunshine and some shade over the summer,
and you're stepping on my property. Those leaves belong to me.
I have a feeling that little squirrel would look at
me and say, you've got less than thirty seconds to
get out of my tree, because in all honesty, none
of this belongs to you. But it's cold. It is
so cold in this forest, and my writing today dealt
with exactly that, in the way of saying you cannot
predict what winter is going to do. I mean, there's
no snow on the ground as of yet, but we're
not even into December yet. It's just a very cold
fall day because winter doesn't hit this forest until December
twenty first. And that's another thing that brings up a
lot of it anxiety to a lot of creative people,
especially these animals. Oh my, I do find it very
fascinating to see how our lifestyles changed when we switched
the clocks back an hour, but yet their body clocks
did not change. That they are doing what they do,
and it feels like that the human being is an
hour behind. So when I say that I don't see
the squirrels, I don't see the birds, I don't see
all of these other things that are usually inside this forest,
especially the deer with their unbelievably thick coats for the winter,
and they are dark this year. Once again, I can't
predict the winter. But what happens, though, when the process
of what we're doing as a family, all animals, what happens.
We've got to be able to recognize each other's strengths,
because if we're going to try to predict it, like
the Farmer's Almanac, there's gonna be a lot of people
out there trying to plant seeds in the ground that
really shouldn't have done it. They should avoided There was
one more frost on the way. Hey, thanks for being
a part of the conversation.