The Liminal Compass: Augmented Reality

Before we set off on expedition I had imagined often what the rainforest might be like. Mostly I pictured the things I feared (the spiders and the snakes) and the impenetrability of it all; the lush tangle of branch, root, leaf and soil. My minds eye was armed with a colour palette, a sense of low dappled light and the idea of density.

I couldn’t have known at the time how redacted a view this was. Looking back from where I am now, I had stood before the rainforest of my imagination as if facing a colour blindness test; a swirl of pigmented dots that contained somewhere within it an image lost in hues I couldn’t yet differentiate. I stood and stared and took in the overall pattern of the forest but its message and meaning was hidden.

And at first even as we made our way along the trail to the small cluster of huts that formed our destination that day that strange kind of blindness persisted. As we moved up the hillside our focus was indeed held by the tangle I had anticipated; navigating over it, through it, round it, under it. But every so often we would pause to catch our breath; to stop and listen and look, and in those moments something extraordinary would happen.

In the sudden stillness that descended, the full image of the forest swam into view. Like the quick sharpening of focus seen through the lens of a microscope, the detail and diversity of the little patch of hillside we stood on emerged as if magnified and multiplied.

A hundred tiny movements began to announce themselves; like stars revealed one by one in the night sky as the light fades enough to see them. The twitch of a wing, the swoop of a flight from branch to branch, the flash of colour as plumage was turned towards us. The sway of vines betraying the presence of beings unseen. The slow, deliberate, enquiring motion of spider leg. The stirring of the ground by creatures hidden beneath the mulch. Everywhere there was motion.

The effect of this infinitely detailed mosaic of movement was overwhelming. How could so much life exist within just the few square metres around us? The forest felt like a sponge, saturated to the point of overflowing. It seemed over the top; preposterous that so much activity should be happening within our reach without even leaving the artery of the path.

Then there was the sound. Perhaps it was simply that the percussive rhythm of my own breath and movement had muffled the song of the forest but when we ceased to move it felt like there was a momentary pause; a second or two of preparation before the orchestra of insects swelled into chorus. The forest seemed to be listening; waiting for this small visiting human audience to settle in their seats before the performance could begin. Into the hush swept a shifting pitch of sound. As if following a score the notes would rise and fall simultaneously across the patch of forest we stood and listened in, ringing out across the hillside. As I listened closer I could hear within the symphonic wash of noise individual voices, resonant, carrying and clear, like the tone of a singing bowl. There were percussive sections, birdcall soloists, the rustling applause of the breeze in the canopy high above. I had expected the rainforest to be full of sounds but this type of harmony; the intentionality that seemed to sit behind this grand performance felt both decadent and generous all at once.

And finally, the dizzying diversity of colour, texture and pattern. The little tract of land held within the boundary of our near vision became a stage lit with a constantly roving spotlight of attention. My eye would be drawn to a flash of iridescence only to dart onwards to the bold patterning of a leafy backdrop and from there to the golden gilding of a beetle’s back. Any one of the protagonists that graced the stage lights would have been worthy of hours of rapt attention. But there seemed always more to see.

The forest and its inhabitants floated in and out of focus and between scales; like that microscopic lens had been replaced by one of higher magnification. The result of this was something like a magic eye image; one of those psychedelic visions that requires a softening of the gaze for the full three-dimensionality of the scene to emerge from its two-dimensional hiding place. I might be entranced by the pearly translucent fringe of a beetle wing; the minute pattern of dots along its outer edges like a jet necklace and then suddenly there it was; the presence of a rainbow-bodied neighbour that had been cohabiting on the same wide leafy platform the whole time. Hiding in plain site. Just waiting for that moment of softening, a shift in consciousness to unlock the door to a parallel, augmented reality.

The sheer diversity and abundance of the visual palette of the rainforest caught me off guard. Every plant and creature seemed decked out in their ceremonial best: dazzling displays of embellishment, bejewelled clusters of colour, shimmer and gloss, contrast everywhere, protective shells and armour that would be the pride of a warrior king. I felt as if I had stumbled into the presence of a master designer who had costumed the forest with an imagination far more adventurous and experimental than my own. The richness felt ostentatious and utterly unapologetic. I looked up from the patch of forest we stood in, home to all this ornate life and through the gap in the trees gazed out on the verdant echos of our little territory rolling out over layers and layers of hillside towards the distant, misty horizon. The calculation of how much life I might be looking out on, based on the evidence of the minute quadrant I occupied, made my mind stutter.

These still moments, caught in the centre point of a kaleidoscope shift of movement, sound, sight and scale felt like being in the company of the brilliantly vivacious. As if the life and soul of the party had swept into the room. A mind-expanding encounter. I could see the hidden image in the dots. I could differentiate between the shades of the rainforest of my imagination and its full technicolour hyper-reality.

When I returned to Scotland I embarked on a slow shift of focus of my own, from coast to coast. I turned my attention first to moving from eastern city to western city and then from there to the landscape I grew up in on the west coast, retracing my steps back to my childhood. And so it happens that I find myself here again, in the place where I started, in one of the last strongholds of Atlantic rainforest left in Europe.

I’ve always thought of this as a subtle landscape. The oaks and hazels and birches, the lichens and mosses here don’t carry the swaggering bombast of the Amazon rainforest, nor sadly the rolling expanses of uninterrupted miles and miles of forest life that Ecuador’s jungle can still claim. And yet, just like their sister woodland on a far-off continent they hide within them a hundred doorways into what feels like an augmented reality; a hidden richness nestling in plain sight within the humble hues of the last pockets of the ancient Celtic Rainforest.

The thing about optical illusions, magic eyes, psychedelic visions, even the modern witchcraft of microscopic magnification, is that what seems like augmented reality is always there, just waiting to be seen. If you don’t look for it it will seldom be visible. But if you do… if you let your vision soften and refocus, if you follow the spotlight of attention wherever it carries you, if you turn the key and unlock the door of consciousness to let the vivacious sweep in, then there it will be.

When I walk in the forests here, amongst the quiet palette of native woodland, I remember the sparkling company of another rainforest and am reminded to raise my expectations. What am I being colour blind to? What have I missed in my impatience for the stars to come out? What performance is waiting for me to settle in order to begin? I stop on the path and look and listen and every time something newer, richer, more vivid swims into view. The improbably decorative repeating star burst motif of sphagnum moss, each spike bearing aloft a dew drop jewel. The bass, baritone, tenor and alto of the wind in winter oaks. The filagree patterns of movement and air caught in rockpool ice. The bright orange buttons studding the ruffles of lungwort lichen. The rainforest here is carrying on a ceremonial celebration of its own too, in its own diverse way.

This is what both these forests have taught me…. Believing in diversity means acknowledging that there is something different out there. It means being open to the full range of otherness that might be hiding in plain sight. It means having faith that there might be more to see, and pausing for long enough on whatever path you find yourself on for the full spectrum of life, colour, sound and movement to reveal itself. It means trusting in another kind of vision. To being diverted to a richer, augmented reality.