Forests have pulsed through my lens as primal muses since photography first gripped me. That late 2023 odyssey from Spain into Portugal's northern wilderness unveiled Mata da Albegaria's primeval cathedral - a living tapestry where dragon-vines coil through arboreal colonnades and sunbeams pierce emerald vaults like celestial needles. Our initial passage became a car-bound ritual of glimpsed mysteries: ancient trees performing slow-motion ballets in the slipstream, their moss-bearded limbs gathering twilight into wine-dark canopies. Returning afoot at magic hour, the forest exhaled its secrets through trembling ferns and liquid light. Each footfall awakened symphonies - crackling humus choruses answered by stream-whispers, while spectral breezes made cathedral organs of the oaks. Here, time unspooled into mycorrhizal networks, each shutter-click capturing not just forms but the very breath of arboreal eternity. In Mata da Albegaria's chlorophyll embrace, civilization's static dissolved into moss-velvet epiphanies - proof that when concrete dreams crumble, forests remain our last living psalters.

- Kun Xiu