Breathing with the Forest – thoughts about loss and the passage of time and the presence of God

‘Breathing with Trees’ is the title of an art installation you can see at Compton Verney (but only if you are quick, it closes on April 6th 2025). I love it and it spoke to me deeply.

Described as a ‘open eyed meditation’ you sit in a darkened room and synchronise your breathing with the music and just watch and watch and watch.

The scene in front of you moves slowly, from the left to the right. It is as if you are sitting in the middle of the forest on a slowly turning turntable but you can only see what is right in front of you.

The trees are ‘breathing’. Life is humming through their roots underground. Everything is connected but the most affecting visual image is of the flow of the air over, around, under the trees. The air flow moves only from left to right, it never moves backwards.

For me, it felt like the Holy Spirit had been made visible. When I teach about God the Holy Spirit I always describe her/him as the ‘invisible, unseen presence of God’, that current of divine life that ignites life in every living thing. Not an impersonal force (although represented as one in this art work) but a personal being whose presence permeates the whole of life. The ‘presence’ was swirling around and under and flowing over every leaf and every twig. It was like seeing for myself the reality of the phrase from Psalm 23 ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me, all the days of my life’.

Having just been through a traumatic experience, my first twenty minutes with this piece of art was very healing. I felt like I’d been give a glimpse of an alternative reality or at least ‘a different way of seeing the world’ .

The distressing image of my broken Barney dog on the road wasn’t erased but I could see it in my mind as if he was cushioned, surrounded, upheld by the invisible white cloud of ‘life/presence of God’. I have no answers as to why the horrid thing happened why, how and when it did but it made a big difference to reframe the image of the little being I loved as held all the time in the love of God even through the trauma.

And why, you might say to me, if God is so loving did he ‘permit’ such a trauma? An understandable question but it only leads to a dead end. No point in going there. Just stop. Accept all the love that flowed so immediately to both Barney and myself. Allow it to hurt but don’t allow that pain to cut you off from God.

We left the art installation, had some lunch and a walk around outside. Then we went back in for a second time. This visit to the rainforest affected me differently. This time I noticed how the picture rolled inexorably forward. Time never goes backwards. In an instant life can change and no matter how much we want to, we cannot put the clocks back to the moment before the event that broke us.

To look at it another way, it comforted me that the picture (in other words the passage of time) only rolled onward slowly. The scene moved steadily. You could not hurry it. This spoke to me about how life comes to us moment by moment, you should not be impatient or anxious about the future. It will come in its own time and will bring with it either ill or good. And if you spend too much time thinking about it, you risk missing what is in front of you right here and right now. Nor can you stay forever in the past although you can look back for a little while while it helps.

Mostly, the loudest message I got from the installation was:

‘God is present, whether you feel him/her or not’ .

There is around you and around me and around all of us, at all times, the flowing, holding, guiding, shaping, directing, and sometimes weeping presence of God. There is also always the visible effects of this breathing life energy. A friend sent me the picture below of all the life blooming in her garden, a constant reminder of life going on. Way before quantum physicts began to explore the ‘thing’ that holds everything together, the apostle Paul wrote ‘in Christ all things hold together’ (Colossians 1:17) Christ who is holding all things together, longs to also hold us together and to carry us forward to the time and place when life and love will triumph, the place where life triumphs and tears are no more (Revelation 21).

If you love the techie side of how they made the art installation, go here: https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/project/breathing-with-the-forest/