‘Watch me. I stand alone. No, I do not long for compassion. This is my site, this my position in real life,’ she says. ‘May be you saw me before, perhaps on another spot. (Think f.e. of the water color W. Turner, classical landscape Finberg Complete Collection nr. CCLXIII-189) I am one of the many. I am so different you even don’t understand; you don’t see it either. My dress is made of soft organic material almost like velvet. Feel it yourself. Touch me tender. Out of the fog I am here in a sudden standstill like silence in dramatic music. Nearly a ghost but in a living body as most ghosts are. Emerging from nowhere, I am your scary dream and all of a sudden gone, though still here. I’m the beginning of the forest or the end of the woods, when all trees have gone for ever. Maybe I‘m the last one you should take care of, admire and revere as the old Druids did long ago. Almost a fossil I am, a remnant of the past. I remind you of something you never saw and though has always been present in your mind. A shadow without body, a body with no shadow. Your dream of last night. A dark blue deep sea where life wavers and thrives. Under water, deep down, life without shape or contours, just a density life passes through. But who are you and your camera? You remind me of Marcovaldo, the man of Calvino who left the countryside and moved to the incomprehensible city. His twin brother you are, I mean, who left the town in opposite direction and got lost in nature. Why do you roam this lonely place?’

She once tumbled down. On this very site she beautifully hides. Like a queen she lies fully stretched and calm and royal. How many years ago she came down, I don’t know. Long enough to let herself overgrown, all over her body, smooth, lovely and incessantly but slowly and unnoticed as life creeps and seeps in her untangled and hideous ways. Mosses, lichens and spider’s webs all over and close to her secret spot everywhere. Her bark is a fine fur coat, a nursery for insects, ants, bugs, beetles. Occasionally bears sniff around for honey from her delicate skin. Look at the colors, the fine tissues and the tiny sprouts from her bark. A micro world of crawling life generation after generation constructing and destroying life she produces in an intense and inextricable symbiosis. A queen for ever in the cloud forest.

Why is she that impressive and so untouchable real although invisible for the largest part? Imagine her height, all the foliage and the rustling in the mountain wind. She lives in different spheres, layers, up into the sky, the universe. By the way, what will be her age? Count the rings of her trunk inside. Imagine you have to climb her all the way to the top. A trunk that huge and wide as if the roots even want to protect her hidden head like a Buddha I once saw in an ancient city of the past. Growing high up in the sky, the skin hides the flow of life juices underneath. All the way as if there is no gravity, no force to keep her low. One needs high heels to admire her all over her fertile body and is still to short. And tall she is, indefinitely taller she will grow beyond imagination, beyond my time of life. She helps to grow herself by creating darkness around her foot and middle, striving for sunlight at the top. When dogs are still puppies one should look at their feet to imagine how big they will grow as adults. This is impossible for the queens of a cloud forest which cover the slopes of the mountains.

Who built this wide bridge so deeply in the tropical forest. You know the names of Juan, Julio, Sergio and maybe a Maria or Clara? They put the pillars, they layed the fundamentals, they dug into the slope of the valley sides. They got a lot of money or they had no money at all and no alternative as jobless workers. They labored and sweated, they made love not knowing anything of the children of the king who would never reach each other. The valley was too deep. Or a big company brought with loaders the mechanical parts and the mechanics connected the parts and disappeared as if nothing happened here and the birds came back to their nests and the trees restarted their eternal rustling. A cast iron frame under the high canopy, framing endlessly the passageway over the deep valley floor. It reminds me of my toy box and its mechanical parts, I played with for hours. A bridge was one of the most ingenious object to construct. Okay. Is this the end of the hike, the floor of the invisible valley too deep and that wide? What about the echo in this dense forest of the valley? Even the fall of a stone, a real big stone would not be heard. There is no floor? This is a floating world? Or is it the entry, the gateway without name to nothingness hiding under densely overhanging foliage. It is all too close, even your words vanish, the silence is in front of you, starts right at your feet. Maybe it is the beginning of a new life on the other side, the unknown. Perhaps you need wings to fly like angels have.