A walk in the woods

A symphony of light permeates the forest this morning. In quiet reception, nature allows those streaming and stretching flecks to angle through the canopy, favoring mountain laurel and wild azalea blossoms. Cracklings of diffused light fall past the blossoms, reaching the forest floor, leftovers from a cosmic journey, satisfying ferns and pine seedlings at light’s end. The landscape did not refuse the water from yesterday’s rain. So the creek ambles and serpentines, carrying with it a secret the rest of us wish to claim—she keeps flowing over and between and past to its destination.

What truth does this village know and we do not? What solitude does she abide caring not for time’s turning or the coming and leaving of seasons? This quiet corner on the mountain absents worry, as if somehow it knows something certain, is unchained from imaginations and machinations.

A walk in the forest seeks and welcomes intention, a wish to leave behind some burden or maybe to bring it and cast it into a ravine or pull it from your pack, set it on a rock, and face it. No matter the wish, the forest gives and restores, slips you into momentary forevers, a gift to take with you when time pressures you again. But before again comes, she will to the watchful bring you to thought’s end, some truth she knows and you do not.

Those forevers pause you, grant you solitudes to turn toward, to draw from the reservoir a perspective, a step toward the end of a thought you had. Long is the journey to reach such an end, a journey this old forest has finished.

What gift should anyone receive from such an observance but that the forest cannot know impatience for she must endure to receive each season’s gift. The forest never rushes or offers some opinion about her lot. Never will she say, “my God,” for by her resignation the forest knows she cannot possess God. If she were able to utter the words, the wind should come and carry the thought away. She and the wind know the utterance “my god” means other gods. Through her resignation, her forbearance, she knows only one God, the One who created her.

There is something else she knows. Every leafing tendril, every stalk and vein drawing nourishment from the forest floor, every flowing rivulet reaching journey’s end has a part to play to make the forest come to life, to fullness. She has no industry but to receive what is given to her from those sunray’s reaching and stretching to bathe her, to not say no to the rain, to be refreshed by the wind. She gifts her faithfulness for all to see. She has reached the end of her thought, reached her journey’s destination by her faithfulness.

This, my friends, we should know—that God will carry us through the season, that we should not say no to the rain and the light of His truth, that through Him we shall reach journey’s end.

Keep walking.