The Soteriology of the Woods
From as early as I can remember I have enjoyed sauntering – that wonderful human act of walking contemplatively in nature. A ten-acre wood backed my childhood home a few miles outside Brazil, Indiana. I spent untold hours in those woods playing with friends and just as many walking alone. When not in school or completing some chore, you could likely find me there, oftentimes with other neighborhood kids. They, my two older brothers, and I invested our childhood in clearing and maintaining what seemed like miles of bicycle trails. The trails traversed hills and hollers and a creek that we affectionately called “sewer creek” because of its stench from septic system runoff from nearby homes, including mine. Along those trails among the trees, we played Batman and Robin, Superman, Indy 500 and pioneers. We also played war (with a special affinity for World War II, after watching old army movies on Channel 4 out of Indianapolis), and we played cowboys and Indians, which to date has not resulted in my childhood being canceled.
My best memories of those woods – full of large oaks and scraggly maples, red buds and flowering dogwoods, brambles and wild grape vines – were my solitary walks attending to that great treasury for the imagination that we called “the woods.” In those woods I first encountered God, the Source of all life, who lived and moved in every square inch of those woods and dwelled in every creature, great and small. The preacher at my local Church told me God dwelled in a faraway Heaven, but I knew instinctively, intuitively, as a child, that God – Divinity – spilled over into those woods. They were enchanted, filled with a deep, deep song that rang out through the movements of White-tailed deer, the elusive pride of feral cats, the flying squirrel I once encountered, even the ticks and mosquitoes, and all of the flora that grew from the dark woodland soil – the trilliums and daffodils, the briars and poison ivy. As the Orthodox Church liturgy proclaims, God is “everywhere present and fillest all things.”
No matter what I was feeling on any given day, a woodland saunter refreshed and restored my spirits. In the experience, I sensed there was a Source who held all things together. I went there often to decompress after a dreadfully-long school day. I recall a long meandering walk I took to deal with the confusion and shock after the death of my dad to leukemia when I was nine years old. After a few moments in those woods, I was reassured that all was well and all would be well, whatever was happening in life. Today I am still drawn to woodlands and feel a day is incomplete if I do not spend a few moments walking a woodland path.
Two years ago, Michelle and I purchased seven acres in northern Clark County in southern Indiana. We sold our suburban home and rented a house while building a cottage atop a knoll that overlooks Polk Run, a creek that meanders through this part of the county and feeds into Fourteen Mile Creek, which empties into the Ohio River about five miles down the road. We moved into our cottage in late April 2020. One of my first orders of business was to clear a walking trail in the woods behind our home, just as I did as a boy in those woods behind my childhood home.
Clearing a trail is always something of a moral quandary for me. To create my new trail I knew I must of necessity disturb the floor of the woods, including the wildflowers and saplings in the path, so I have kept the trail as narrow and modest as possible to minimize my impact. A year into our time at Polk Run Cottage I have walked the trail through the woods in all four seasons. I have enjoyed views of spring flowers blooming through last year’s decaying leaves. I sauntered during the hot days of summer when I fought off mosquitoes and ran into my share of spider webs spanning across the path. I saw the trail blocked by Polk Run when its high waters came out the creek after heavy fall rains, leaving the trail impassable for days at a time. I took crunchy walks over ice and snow among ice-covered trees, their branches glistening in the winter sun.
The hillside meadows and wooded hollers surrounding our cottage dispense the same blessed assurance and calming effect as did the woods behind my childhood home. A stand of trees as an icon of the Divine Soul is salvific. Trees die and rise again to save us. A grove of maples can restore a man’s sanity in a mad world. In the woods I commune with the oaks and the ashes; I joyfully and humbly partake at the table of those sylvan sacraments.