The wood remembers how to be alive.

It starts with one small life over still water — and it does not stay small.

Then the air fills.

Two dozen sparrows break from the reeds and turn as one body. Life arrives in numbers, or it does not arrive.

Down in the fern-dark, small fires open their eyes.

Every dusk the ground gives up a little light. Watch where the ferns breathe.

The light goes molten.

The fen holds its breath. Something older than the wood is turning over in its sleep.

It wakes.

The whole fen catches fire without burning. This is what you came down here to see.

Everything you woke.

A field index of the fen's inhabitants, in the order they stirred. Each entry flies you back to its creature.

We don't build the wild. We wake it.

Patient work, native planting, and the stubborn belief that a place will remember itself if you give it back its dark, its water, and its quiet.

Come in.