I went to the forest today with an old, old ache in my heart. It's a frequent visitor, a thing I've learned to live with. I told it to the trees, muttered it to the air in sighs and weary sentence fragments. After just two hours, I returned to my car with a joy just as old, but so often overlooked. The summer woods are bright green and golden in the sunlight. This is the usually-barren place of my winter treks. It was almost magical to see the gray old trees where I wander all winter newly decked out in full leaf, lovely and shaded. This ancient hickory is one of my favorite trees in all the world; I must have photographed it a dozen times in all its seasonal states. It looks like a dendrite or a nerve ending, seen beneath a microscope. Look at the wild branches that strike off into the forest canopy in the shape of lightning rods. Then this little box turtle happened along to assuage my sorrows, too. As did the birds with their songs, and the silence, and the subtle beauty, and the solitude, and the thoughts that only come to me in such places as this...thoughts that act more like a...prayer. There is a turning that waits in our hearts, a place and a time to push past all that is false and reach for the things that matter. And though the sadness returns too, it cannot last forever. No season is forever. It sounds wistful, but it's not. There are times when I believe that change and impermanence are our best hope. The forest is a healing place.
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