We are not meant to go this world alone.
Yet some of us are wired so differently that it’s harder for us than for those more neurotypically wired to make and then maintain human connections. Through kind and compassionate awareness, we can bridge the gap between our worlds. But in times when that is more difficult to begin with such as pandemic, war, climate crisis and times of personal trauma, it is simply more challenging to do this and all the more important to reach out to an understanding caring other.
And always, for those, like me, for whom nature is the ultimate restorer, having beautiful wild spaces where we can disconnect from the madness of the human world and reconnect with our own wildness and sense of connection with nature is vital.
Merely remembering the importance of this and welcoming ourselves to carry our burdens outside of the small confines we too often hold them within is key to healing our broken hearts and beginning to make meaningful connections in this oh so fragmented world of pain and beauty.
Ways the Woods Can Ease our Sorrows: Walking in a Little Wood in Early Spring
At first walking out into the cold, still bright evening, the welcome rush of springtime air is competing for attention with my upset disposition.
I walk slowly up the trudge of hill and with each tired step I am convincing my body it is a good idea to keep going.
Keep going, Jill. You know how badly you need this.
Partway up the hill I make it to the muddy driveway turning into the park where I crunch on snow to avoid the worst of red muck tire grooves and half frozen ridges.
Crunching through the ice encrusted snow here is so satisfying. Satisfying because I feel each crunch in the hollows of my chest. I feel something other than sadness, confusion and so much pain.
Over the snow I go towards the entrance to the little woods. Here I pause to greet a couple slogging out with their dog and they are grinning despite the wet, snowy effort; grinning perhaps because it is mild and they are wearing spring jackets and the air feels so alive with possibility.
I give them a moment to get out before I enter the wood, then head in a direction for a short walk on a trail I never go on. I turn this way because I am sad and something is calling me in… but what?
Novelty? The purity of the mostly unbroken snow? The way the trees and snow obscure the pathway?
Then I notice these stunning, almost translucent blood-orange blotches on the snow beneath an evergreen tree trailside. Blotches that look like watercolour splashed about but where did the colour come from?
I turn around to see the bright orange sun blazing through the thin swath of trees behind me; its brightness gleaming into the wood and landing on whatever receptive thing is in its path. Feeling receptive, I reach my hand down to the patch of snow and instantly my hand becomes awash in colour too. I look up and meltwater on the tree branches glistens like little brilliantly coloured gemstones.
I wonder what stone gleams like this cross between topaz and ruby red? Rusty like the red earth mud. Brilliant like lost blood. And beautiful beyond words…so blessedly lovely.
I am struck by the way one moment can shine so brightly when I feel so wrecked by life. Yet, here it is before me gleaming anyhow and despite the heartache of this world I feel a flicker gleam within me too.
The snow here is deep and the trail unbroken save some paw prints and a few sunken boot tracks where someone sank to nearly kingdom come. I choose to turn around and backtrack my own tracks along to the main trail and off into the belly of the little woods; a main trail with much surer footing to better hold me.
I walk along and notice my shoulders are still up around my ears so I welcome myself to let my shoulders drop and when this feels so much better I decide to let my stomach loosen its grip of tense gut holding and then, since this all feels so good, I begin to pay attention to my pace and let my footsteps fall in a slow and rhythmic way.
As I do this I think of my husband and the mindful walking he learned at his meditation teacher training retreat in Barre, Mass in January 2020. Just over two years ago and yet it feels like two lifetimes ago in this warp of time we all have lived called pandemic.
I think of my philosophy and poetry loving, naturalist Uncle Gerald and all the “mindful” walking he has done in life without ever calling it that. Always gently welcoming us to pause and notice, to feel the stillness, to listen to the silence and to be wonderstruck.
And I think of Thich Nhat Hanh, and what a gentle peace loving teacher he was.
If we sit mindfully, if we walk mindfully and reverently on the earth, we will generate the energies of mindfulness, of peace, and of compassion in both body and mind.
As I walk and listen to the relative silence of the woods the sun drops low in the western sky.
Lower and lower it falls and slower and slower I walk until I pause where it looks like the trees have shed big salty tears onto the snowy forest floor beneath their feet. Listening, I hear a songbird call out, a squirrel chattering and I watch as meltwater falls like tears.
I lean into an evergreen so that I feel like I am in its arms. From this safe space I silently tell the forest about my sadness; of the great pain in my heart over so much death and confusion and destruction in the world. I reach out to feel the drips of water that seem to be on every little branch tip…touch my fingertips to their perfection and feel their aliveness in the world, just as alive as my own aliveness, tip my head back and let the meltwater from the snowstorm the day before fall down on my cheeks and feel my own chest well up with tears for the two tragic deaths I knew this week.
As a shudder of grief comes over me I remind myself to keep walking the snowy woodland trail…to break new ground where the snowy path hasn’t been broken yet…to forge onward and let the forest bear my sadness with me…and as I do I realize a house full of people, even people I dearly love, is much too small to hold a deep feeling family’s pain. I have to get it out into the world and yet because of the pandemic, so much of our grieving has been in the claustrophobic confines of our four walls…all a-lonely and oh so isolating.
I reach out to feel the soft, wet touch of old man’s beard and it reverberates all through me.
I notice how a fallen tree leaked yellow stains like urine all over the snow and I know that while from different kingdoms, these lichen, trees and I, we are not so very different; just trying to peacefully live our lives in the situations we find ourselves in.
For the forest and the creatures therein… they are struck by the confusion of an early spring and then a heavy snowfall…warm springlike temperatures and then deep drops and snow…a roller coaster of ups and downs that mimics life…and to some extent…in a more moderate sense…the beings of the forest are designed for this and so are we…but not for the extremes that we are living in this day and age.
Maybe that is part of the sadness. The difficulty of the world we live in. The unreal amount of disconnection and the ego drive for competition. The work until you die lifestyle and that is still not enough to make ends meet. The painful stigma around mental illness and neurodivergence that doesn’t allow people to share the difficulties of such things. Maybe these are some of the reasons that people drink too much and do hard drugs and die.
Oh the pain of addictions. Oh the pain of mental illness.
The trees are silent now. I must go on.
From here the trail breaks out onto the gravel road with only one pair of footprints heading out from the bottom portion of the woods.
I stand awhile to gaze upon the golden stubble of the cornfield breaking out from the new cover of snow like a bed of nails that pierced a loose weave white cotton blanket. I want to lie here. Beyond the field, the sky’s awash in soft colours all stacked in rows bleeding down into each other…beautiful and as muddled as my emotions.
The farm buildings beyond the field, one rusty red, another cornflower blue, look like the palette the sky artist’s brush was dipped in to paint the mellow eastern sky these muted shades while the western sky behind me contains all the drama of the blazing setting sun.
I feel good here because there is no need to hide my pain and I love what I see so much I want to stay forever but night will soon be falling and with it the cold and dark.
Do I stay or do I go?
I hear this song in my head like I'm a kid again. It has a playful quality about it and makes decision making seem so light and easy but decisions don't come easy to me. Never have and maybe never will.
I feel the constraints of possibly being found by other trail walkers while I stand too long staring at what might be an ordinary scene to someone else.
I finally decide to head into the next section of woodland trail and it is in the embrace of this wood with its lessening light, with the winds of March sighing in small gusts and trees creaking and moaning, that I feel my sadness finally escape me.
The trees with all their very human sounds and motions seem to be rocking me in their branches as I move between them on the trail. Around the corner and up the tunnel back to the gravel road I go, listening as the water splatters on the snow…as squirrels chatter busily preparing for night…as my feet make their way watching for places where someone has sank almost to their knees on the now faltering snow.
Walking. Listening. I keep going.
Across the gravel road to the final stretch but to get there I have to walk through snow over my boots and because it is mild I don’t have my leg warmers on so the snow cascades in little rushing torrents down my boots.
I can feel this grainy snow cold against where my socks should be but my socks have worked their way off my heels and rolled into thick ridges under the arches of my feet. I feel the granules of snow melt as they touch my bare skin and I love it. I love it because it feels like winter bleeding into springtime.
Bleeding into instead of bleeding out.
It is decidedly cold and wet now in my boots but I am no longer stuck.
I'm trudging onward and cold and wet but importantly I am no longer stuck. Stuck like when I was a young child and playing in my neighbors’ ditch in March and didn’t know that the bank of snow over the ditch was rotten and that there was a freezing, rushing river of ditch water beneath it threatening to take me down into a death trap.
That day I had to be rescued by kind adults and dragged out of the danger I didn’t understand. Dragged sockfooted across the yard, my boot forever lost to me.
So too with playing in snow covered ditches in springtime. Lost to me like my boot.
But here I am, now, happy in this moment.
Here on this final leg of my journey where the trail is very short though the snow is deeper and unbroken by others since the last spring snow storm. Here where the path is straight and narrow with evergreen branches obscuring the way so that I have to duck in one great swoop downwards, almost crawling, to get out to where the apple trees mark the beginning of tended parkland.
The deep duck feels like a benediction to all that life has been and is. Feels like a final bow to the prayer the little woods has just said with me.
A prayer that welcomed me to be held by forces larger than my own small self.
A prayer that welcomed me to pause and touch my cheek to the snow capped branch tips and feel the cold against my cheeks and let it sear a moment so I could feel the cold burn.
Feel it searing into me the way the pain I felt over the heartache of knowing of two close tragedies in one week felt before it hollowed me out to emptiness.
A prayer that feels like life feels when you remember that the energy in me and you and in the trees and squirrels and birds and lichens and corn stubble and snow melting into water is all the same.
A prayer that says hallelujah for this living breathing world of living and dying, of receiving and of being received.
A prayer so large it praises the immensity of it all.
A prayer that says let me not destroy you or myself or this world or any being in this world.
A prayer that says let us heal our hearts together.
In being so received by this little wood I have received what I need to return to the busyness of my house and family.
For this I am so grateful.
Thanks for reading.
Be well,
Jill