Into the Forest I Go, to Lose My Mind and Find My Soul
Is this how we are meant to withstand the darkness of the night?
Hi,
How are you this week? Did you manage to lose something? What did you find?
This week, I received news that called into question some aspects of my life I have held dear. Additionally, my health has worsened again, leaving me wrapped in discomfort and increasing pain.
Still, I went to the beach to sit on a small, sharp ledge protruding from the cliff's wall, to watch the stormy waves, and to jump from rock to rock just as I did as a child. I placed my hands on the ground to feel the pulsating body of the world. I climbed up to a cave and stretched my arms out to let them be cleansed by water dripping from its roof. I took my shoes off and stood on the moist, sticky sand, and the ocean water spilled over my feet, wetting my trouser-ends.
I spent over an hour there. It was my body’s natural response to the anxiety that welled up inside me that morning, and which I hadn’t felt in a long while. I decided not to interrupt my body as it did what it knows best: restoring the balance. Walking back from the beach, the anxiety was already gone: soaked into the porous soil, washed away by the ocean waves, and dispersed in the wind that pushed and pulled my elongated form sideways as I walked atop the cliff.
I have been thinking recently that I’d like to write more about my grandma. I did so, a little, in one of the previous letters, which some of you perhaps remember. And yet, it doesn’t seem sufficient.
My grandma, or as we say in Polish, Babcia, is now eighty-nine and will turn ninety this September (she’s planning to throw a big summer party in the garden, complete with a bonfire and music). Her hands, wrinkled, marked by arthritis, and bearing the physical evidence of her strenuous labour as a nurse, are a picture of love, care, and perseverance.
Those same hands taught me how to hold a birch tree with care and kindness.
We would roam into the forest, grandma and I, and we’d go where the birches gather — which would typically be announced from afar by the underbrush actively thinning into the open meadow.
“Take your shoes off,” grandma’s soft wisdom would ordain, and we’d both place our bare feet on the world’s muddy floor, blanketed with fields of moss, generations of fallen leaves, or youthful grass — if we had ventured into the fields already. We then would stretch our arms forward, standing on opposite sides of the birch trunk, and wrap them around its firm body, swaying gently with the wind. Whenever I think of it, I can still feel the touch of the forest's skin against that of my own: the tree's texture on my left cheek, and the closeness of grandma's calm breathing on the right. Her eyes, sometimes closed, other times half-open and tenderly set on me with love.
Her love is unlike any other I’d ever experienced. It doesn’t expect anything from me other than just to be, as I already am, and to take care of myself. Steady and patient as a birch tree, she always waits for me to come to her, sit down, tell my stories — and listen to hers. Those always pertain to the bird that visited her balcony on Wednesday afternoon, or the way the small dog came and asked to receive a little helping of an apple she would have every day for a late morning snack, or what the chickens do — and how, which days were sunny, warming her body well enough to go for a long walk around the fields and a little into the forest, where she’d end her trip, resting her small, old, fragile body on a stack of wood under a big, old, strong body of a beech tree — “to breathe the forest some”, as she’d explain. These stories are repeated every time I come and listen, yet they're precious and wonderful all the same.
Grandma loves freely and openly. She offers the same kind of love to the chicken, the small chubby dog, the birch tree, the sun — and the cloud covering it, the rain, the early spring flower, and to the wintery ice which makes it too slippery for her to go on her daily walks for weeks on end. All of it is the same kind of love which she offers to me.
Grandma’s love doesn’t divide or choose; instead, it spreads and spreads and there’s no end to it, or limit. It touches every one, and every thing, with equal warmth and attention. “I like to share” she says when she brings me a box of chocolates she received for her birthday. She also likes to offer whatever small, but important in her eyes, amount of leftover food we had for lunch. If nobody wants any more, she scoops it into a lidded container with care, and carries it outside, to share with the chickens, whom, I am pretty sure, she also tells about the sun, and the cloud, and the early spring flowers.
Grandma’s way of life is one of being. Whether it is life that happens to her, or is it that she has happened to life — and now, astounded and moved, it carries her as gently and steadily as it can through the days and months — that I don’t know. But I do know that when she opens her eyes in the morning, and when she gets up to pick a matching set of clothes “to look elegant” (for us, and I suppose, for the chicken, and the dog, and the sun, and the cloud), she knows what she lives for. How many of us can say that?
I am pretty certain that it is from grandma that I inherited the longing for the forest, the familiarity when speaking with a tree, the safety of living under the infinite roof of blueness, the curiosity to watch the frog laying eggs in a creek cutting through the field, and the inner calling, like the one of the visitor bird, or the geese, over and over announcing my place in the family of things.
Would I understand by myself that it is in the forest where one finds their soul and, necessarily for this endeavour, loses their mind? How would I be without learning the tender love circling through my body like the juices flowing through the body of a tree I was hugging barefoot? What would I know if I wasn’t taught how to talk to a dog, or to a chicken, or how to ask a frog in early May about her little hoppers? Where would I stand today if my feet, stepping alone out of the struggle to make friends at school, didn’t lead me, over and over again, between the trees? How would I look if I didn’t dip my face into the lakes of grass, or place my cheek against the soft mossy pillow, and lay as still as a rock, trying to learn its soft mossy ways?
I used to worry sometimes, about grandma and her fragile body. It seemed to delicate to carry her safely through the thickening time. But now I can see that it is as strong as the tallest beech, and as flexible as the wild grass blade. And I know that she, arriving into each day with an open chocolate box in one hand and a woollen love-knitted sweater in the other, both to offer and share, lands firmly and surely, and she’s not going anywhere else where she already hadn’t stepped in her worn-out shoes, matching the dress.
Is this how we are meant to withstand the darkness of the night? Always spreading our arms to the sun, forever reaching tall, and steadily — but doing so where our feet already stand, and at any moment? What can we learn from a chicken? What can a dog tell us as it chews an apple? I used to worry I was too soft, too sensitive. That’s what they’d tell me, after all. But I know I am strong like the birch tree, which I hugged so many times, and I can take in as much as the moss field can, absorbing all the night’s rainfall. And if I don’t forget to stop and ask a sparrow how it is doing, and its family, I can, too, fly — even if just a little.
So I happily go and lose my mind, over and over. I let its contents fall in between the friendly sand grains as I jump from one rock to another. And I lift my face up, to the sun, the wind, and the rain, and let them show me what I am made of — and what for I live.
“Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”
— Henry Thoreau
Question to you, dear reader:
How do you restore your balance?
I fully connect with this piece, the purity of those two relationships, with nature and your grandmother. I wish all my relationships could have this quality, but I accept life has a habit of being more complex. I guess I am human, have sensitivities, needs, hurts ... as do others. As a person who seeks deeper meaning from life I get such healing and understanding from nature and write often with that as my inspiration. That wasn't really intended, it just happened by the by like that, I'm an accidental poet! Lovely to connect with you here your similar sense of it in a different form.