The old people of the forest had no temples. They had oaks.
They believed that everything living had begun in the branches of one great tree chosen by the gods, and that a man who stood among such trees long enough would stop being only a man. They gathered mistletoe from the oaks with knives of gold, brewed it into their potions, and listened. They were called the people of the oak. The Romans who wrote about them understood very little, and wrote it all down anyway.
This is what became of one of them.
He stayed in the forest too long. Bark grew over his cheeks, splinters of wood took the place of skin, small antlers rose from his brow like the first twigs of spring. One eye still burns, green and gold, from somewhere deep inside the tree he has become. Ferns grow through him. Blue flowers open where his hands used to be. If you walked past at night, you would see only a thicket and a little mist. Only if you stopped would the thicket look back.
Histories begin with facts and slowly turn into lies. Myths do the opposite. They begin as stories no one can prove, and the longer they are told, the more truth they gather. The Druid is not in any history book. He has been in every forest you have ever been afraid of.
His face was made by hand from cherry-wood chips and bark, in the spirit of Arcimboldo's composite heads. Two years later the same face returned to the collection, older and crowned, as the Forest Lord leading the Wild Hunt.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2022.)
