Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for being a part of the conversation. This
is Forest Stories. I am the Poet in the Forest,
a children's series that I pinned out in the nineteen nineties. Now,
none of it would be possible if it wasn't for
this forest right here in South Charlotte, North Carolina. I
talk about it so much that I thought maybe it's
time that you get to know what has inspired me
for thirty years. Thanks for being a part of the conversation.
Welcome back to the forest. In the background, you may
hear saws, and you're going to hear a lot of chassi.
A lot of my forest is being taken down right now.
I first entered this forest in nineteen ninety two. Many
of these trees were still just babies, just babies. But
after thirty two, thirty three years, what's happening is is
that they've become overgrown, and arbarus have said, you can't
do this. You can't just let trees grow wild. They're
not weeds, they're trees. You need to take care of them.
And so it's very fascinating to watch these artists up
in the sky on ropes bring clarity to this moment
of chaos in the way of saying, we're trying to
save your trees. We don't want them to go away
because they're such a major part of your writing, your imagination,
your creativity. All we want to do is bring peace
to them, because right now your trees are suffering because
you've allowed them to just be themselves, which is what
an artist does, and artists allows themselves to be themselves.
But sometimes even as artists, we overgrow, we become clogged
up because of our visions and ambitions to really become something,
and we don't stop. And when we make mistakes or
hit walls, what do we do? We keep pushing, but
we don't let things go. And these Arborous are so
amazing and helping me understand that we are not stealing
the life from these trees that have been a part
of my life for thirty two thirty five three years.
What we're doing is allowing them to have another twenty
five or thirty years. And that's the shock of it all,
is that we're trying to bring forward the future while
living in a past that has so many pages written
about it. I sit here in this writing chair and
I write about these trees all the time, but being
uneducated in the way of being an arborist. They understand
what the future is all about, and that is you've
got to prune. And even my pastor an Elevation Church, says,
you got a prune, dude, you got a prune. If
you don't prune your life and your trees, then you're
gonna have situations where you're gonna have to have cutbacks,
cutbacks that are gonna be painful, which today is to
see these trees being cut My god. They were seedlings
when I first met them, young ones, and now they're
being cut back. But it doesn't mean they're gone forever,
because when you hire someone who understands what the process
of your vision is, then there is more generations beyond
this moment of now. Hey, thanks for being a part
of the conversation.