Making A Home in the Forest

Believe then, if you please, that I can do strange things: I have, since I was three year old, conversed with a magician, most profound in his art and yet not damnable. 

Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It.

My use of virtual worlds involves constant and consistent attempts to reshape my house like a soft whelk that finds the one growing on its back no longer fits. This time the home is not a house alone but, thanks to Inworldz's generosity of prims and space, a house with an orchard and a garden . . . in a Forest.

During my RL week, while I was watching the Animated Shakespeare of As You Like It, the realization of just exactly why I had chosen to wrap a forest around my small new avatar became clearer. A clockwork-animated, shiny red, springy-legged ladybird expanded my plans when it flew onto Orlando's love letter, mapping out a zigzag path in iambic time to Rosalind's reading. Tiny prims or an artful sculpty will make me a caterpillar!

In the Animated Forest of Arden, designed by Valentin Olshang and directed by Alexi Karayev, an inspired band of animators and painters made sure Shakespeare's clown, Touchstone, might be plagued by viciously delicate mosquitoes and that the goat, which he kisses in error, wears a most fetching rose headpiece. Already it sounds like the worlds we know and love. 

There may be no clocks in the Forest of Arden but, as in the one I am building, there are orchards. So the shepherd, who Celia and Rosalind accost on their entry, wields a stout crook with which he obligingly hooks down juicy, crunchy, red fruit. The brims of lusty Shepherdesses' hats are laden with summer flowers. Rosalind's feathered pilgrim hat, dropped from the trees she climbs to school Orlando, goes on adventures all of its own. Whilst Orlando's determined, programmed, love letters sail downstream, fashioned into paper boats. 

The fantastic Forest fauna include deer for Jacques to sigh over, unicorns who entwine horns, and an anxious lioness to threaten and reconcile the brothers Oliver and Orlando. There is a  snail to illustrate Orlando's fault when he turns up late, "Nay, an you be so tardy, come no more in my sight: I had as lief be wooed of a snail." Heavily featured in the tree tops are a newly discovered species of monkey-baboon. For when I am a wife, explains Rosalind, I will be "more new-fangled than an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey." The part of Rosalind is spoken by consummate artist, Sylvestra le Touzel, an actress whose stage performances I much enjoyed and admired.

Shepherdess

Jean-François Millet, Shepherdess, 1860s, originally uploaded by Gatochy.

'Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seemed to stand alone and inaccessible? There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in many a drawing of J.F.Millet. The little figure is away, aloof. The girl stands so when the painter is gone. She waits so on the sun for the closing of the hours of pasture. Millet has her as she looks, out of sight.' Alice Meynell, Solitude.

The colour of the evening sky here has the luminescence of late Autumn. As the sun sets it creates an iris of blues, silvery white and purples. Freya Stark writes of young Arabian shepherdesses who wear tall conical hats. On the evening skyline she watches them make their way homeward, trailing their long skirts in the dust.