What is it that is so enchanting about passing through a forest? I want to try and understand what enchantment is, why flocks of people migrate to the Galiyat in the summers just to cut through foliage. Why is it that, this is all it takes, to be reborn for the next working season.

Maybe it’s the monsoon that creeps into the alpine canopy, like spirits wanting to breath out more, into all the fresh air cascading down this tree line. I don’t understand what it is but it borrows my breath away for a bit.

Or maybe it’s how it grants you access into extreme depths of darkness before showering upon you glimmers of sunshine all in one ambush. Maybe it’s a raindrops twisted idea to work in sync with these glimmers and make us hallucinate. I can’t see what it is, it just deceives me into believing, that my visual spectrum after all, might not be as broad as I imagined it to be.

Then again maybe it’s how the bark grips your fingers to pull you up the slope. How the dew slips across the grass to tickle your bare feet, so you smooth along too. Or when the cedar bristles brush past your skin. I don’t know what it is, but as it introduces you to the wonders of hapticity, it discreetly makes you a stranger to your own skin.

Maybe it’s how its ignites you curiosity, whispering a waterfall of creative ideas into your head. But before you can salvage even a bit of these ideas, it hisses away, robbing you of all these echoes along the way.

At times when you can taste the moistness in the soil yards away, just because its tang escaped the little slit in your window. And that craving, a craving you didn’t even know existed before, is so great that you start wondering when you began to lose your sophisticated palette to such raw flavors.

As you pass through a forest you don’t just pass through it, you keep getting devoured in, without even knowing how your being stripped away bit by bit. Devoured by the wilderness, where none of your well bred senses are of use. So you get stripped off of your senses. Your breathing gets stripped off of its well bred air, your vision gets stripped off of its well chiseled frame, your skin gets stripped of its polished surface, your palette forgets to recognize refined blends from the many different cuisines it has tasted, and finally your head is stripped bare of the brainstorm of voices it had picked up over its years of experience.

Everything sucked out except vacuum. Everything taken away except hunger. Everything gone except a craving for a filling. Everything except a craving to sense whatever comes up. To breather deeper, to catch every glimpse that lands upon your sight, to feel all textures independent of each other, to decipher all that the whispers were trying to tell you, and to savor every bit of this new found enlightenment. Flocks of people don’t visit this wilderness to give away their senses, they only come here to empty the reservoir of sensations that restricted the passage, for new found feelings.

Whereabouts: Alpine Forests of the Galiyat,  KPK Pakistan

Season: Monsoon 2015

Story: The Galiyat are a hill tract to the North East of Islamabad. It has been a summer attraction since the times of British India.