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Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for being a part of the conversation. This

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is Forest Stories. I am the Poet in the Forest,

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a children's series that I pinned out in the nineteen nineties. Now,

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none of it would be possible if it wasn't for

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this forest right here in South Charlotte, North Carolina. I

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talk about it so much that I thought maybe it's

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time that you get to know what has inspired me

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for thirty years. Thanks for being a part of the conversation.

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Welcome back to the forest. In the background, you may

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hear saws, and you're going to hear a lot of chassi.

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A lot of my forest is being taken down right now.

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I first entered this forest in nineteen ninety two. Many

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of these trees were still just babies, just babies. But

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after thirty two, thirty three years, what's happening is is

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that they've become overgrown, and arbarus have said, you can't

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do this. You can't just let trees grow wild. They're

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not weeds, they're trees. You need to take care of them.

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And so it's very fascinating to watch these artists up

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in the sky on ropes bring clarity to this moment

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of chaos in the way of saying, we're trying to

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save your trees. We don't want them to go away

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because they're such a major part of your writing, your imagination,

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your creativity. All we want to do is bring peace

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to them, because right now your trees are suffering because

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you've allowed them to just be themselves, which is what

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an artist does, and artists allows themselves to be themselves.

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But sometimes even as artists, we overgrow, we become clogged

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up because of our visions and ambitions to really become something,

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and we don't stop. And when we make mistakes or

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hit walls, what do we do? We keep pushing, but

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we don't let things go. And these Arborous are so

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amazing and helping me understand that we are not stealing

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the life from these trees that have been a part

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of my life for thirty two thirty five three years.

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What we're doing is allowing them to have another twenty

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five or thirty years. And that's the shock of it all,

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is that we're trying to bring forward the future while

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living in a past that has so many pages written

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about it. I sit here in this writing chair and

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I write about these trees all the time, but being

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uneducated in the way of being an arborist. They understand

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what the future is all about, and that is you've

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got to prune. And even my pastor an Elevation Church, says,

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you got a prune, dude, you got a prune. If

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you don't prune your life and your trees, then you're

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gonna have situations where you're gonna have to have cutbacks,

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cutbacks that are gonna be painful, which today is to

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see these trees being cut My god. They were seedlings

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when I first met them, young ones, and now they're

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being cut back. But it doesn't mean they're gone forever,

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because when you hire someone who understands what the process

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of your vision is, then there is more generations beyond

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this moment of now. Hey, thanks for being a part

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of the conversation.