Lost in the Woods

The salal is thick and covers the contours of the land. Fallen trees decorated with moss and turkey tail mushrooms are ladders through this curvy bramble, this cemented puzzle of branches and leaves, but their bodies only reach so far before returning me to entanglement. The sky, barely visible through waves of trees, is slowly crumbling into darkness. 

Being lost in the woods in a park surrounded by roads and houses on an island surrounded by water isn’t as dangerous as being lost in true wilderness, but at the time my mind cannot differentiate between the two kinds of Lost. I’d hopped off the trail to avoid a puddle of slushy icy mud and reasoned if I just walked a bit this way and that I’d come to the trail again. With less than a half hour until sunset and temperatures dropping below freezing, all I can think is Walk Faster.

I navigate in stars, wheels, a splayed body of radial arms testing out trails that lead to tangles I must push through. My mind says “That will take too long! Try another way!” My heart creeps up into my throat, pounds in my ears so that I can barely hear the rip slip slide of branches against my down jacket. I know this feeling of panic and I know it won’t help me find the trail. I breathe into my belly and my belly responds with kicks and flutters. She is here with me and I say, “We will be OK.” I hope it to be true. 

I come to an opening in the dense forest. My eye is following the blackness creeping from the ground and up the trees. Lightening? I wonder. In the charred clearing I find a small fuel container, melted plastic bottles, a white shirt (unburned) hanging on the end of a downed trunk. Then I see the camp. The shelter is made of tree limbs and there is something inside, a green suitcase of somesort but being the polite (anxious) person that I am I do not investigate the contents of the dwelling. I don’t want to go anywhere near it. I feel like I’ve stumbled into someone’s living room and although I am pretty sure there is no one around I can’t help but feel like it was my fault I ended up here, as if I was being nosy. Am I being watched, tracked, lured somehow? I think I see a movement in the camp. 

I don’t turn back to see if it is a man, a fluttering cloth, a bird.

I scramble up the hill.

I want to find a trail, any trail, and go home. Just walk in a straight line, I tell myself. Stop doubling back, I chide. Asphalt roads on two sides, trails on the other two, I can break out of this box. Walk. Keep walking.

Kicks in the belly.

I need to keep us safe. 

I push through bushes and climb over nurse trees towards the remnants of sunset. There is a break in the bushes. The trail was less than a hundred feet away from the camp! I walk. My vision blurs in the dusk and I turn around quickly to find shadows hiding in the hollowed out curves of the trail. There is no one following me.

We are OK.

I let my mind wander and it soon outpaces me. My hands gravitate to my belly and the wanderer within. I think of all the women who are forced to walk on trails that were not loops in parks, to be forced off onto paths or through thickets they never imagined they’d face, through woods that were not leading them back to a warm home. Women whose bodies swell with the ocean inside as they cross the sea in leaky rafts and over-burdened fishing boats. I imagine them rubbing their bellies and telling the babies inside that they will be OK, we will be OK, and wanting to believe it is true as the water washes over the deck and pale, drawn faces search the horizon for shore. And once they are on shore they walk, they stumble, they rely on whatever they can find to nourish the life inside. They find camps and perhaps worry about their safety among a bramble of strangers. They search for a trail to lead them away from the camp in offices designated for refugees where they hope to find a country to take them in. Somewhere they can create a new home. Somewhere their baby can be born and thrive. Out of the woods, out of the danger of forced transience.

I walk faster as the forest gives way to a clearing I know means I am just a car ride from Home. I am tired and grateful and tell myself that next time I will pack a headlamp, food, water, one of those foil blankets, because who knows what can happen in the woods when you go off the path. Or stay on it. Nothing is certain. I am grateful for this life I have, this life I am holding within me. I am in awe of those women who hold chaos, grief, and loss with the other few possessions on their back as their bellies swell with life and hope in a bittersweet counterbalance.

Coming Home

I can feel the quiet seep into my bones, muscles aching from a day in trains and buses and planes and shuttles and cabs. The damp green smell of the woods and earth, the light shining on the porch to greet me. I climb the stairs to my room as the house sleeps. Six weeks isn’t long but long enough to forget details and invent a whole other life. I hadn’t thought about my room in weeks, about the driftwood whales and shells on an alter and the tree that scratches hello at my window that had green leaves and whispered of summer when I left and is now an orchestra of brown pods shaking in the autumnal wind. But in the night I couldn’t even see the tree. 

In my big bed I dream of orcas. It was if they were welcoming me back to the northwest, reminding me of my place and my blessed vulnerability when I float quiet and still, orca jaws rubbing and nipping at my side. They swim in the wide deep expanses that consume my mind with shadows and multi-toned movement, consume this land and create a shore licked with cold salty tongues.

I wake to soft conversations and the smell of onions and eggs in hot oil. I shake free of fins and waves. I stare at the trees outside until I throw off the quilts and stretch in the coolness of my room. The smell of cooking mingles with coffee and fades. The conversations below cease as days in the wider world begin, doors open and shut, I imagine boots slipped quietly onto wool-socked feet. I walk onto the landing and catch my breath at the outer beauty of the old barn in the soft gray of a cloudy morning. All I can hear are frogs and birds and a brushing of motion that could be tree or car or water but I cannot tell and do not need to know. 

Downstairs a guitar rests upon a wall as if ready to be picked up and strummed, an avocado sits half eaten on the counter, coffee is still warm in the press. Signs of life and simplicity that I have missed. Tables tumble forth with eggplant and onions, apples and garlic. The abundance of this place! I can’t help but smile as I brew my tea and suddenly hear the songs and words that have been stoppered by city fences break lose into the foreground of my mind. Oh that’s right. They need space, too. The space I had briefly forgotten exists, like the spiderwebbed cracks in the wall of my room. It is like waking up from a dream with the relief and knowing that even if both worlds are real (orcas (taxi cabs? A city life?) nipping at your heart), this is the one that feels good and true and alive.   

This is the Home I have missed and craved and fear and love. And now all I have to do is actually Be Here. That’s all. And that is simply the most difficult part for me. I am slowly realizing that my success lay not in the achievement of some outwardly goal like the city (entrenched in my brain) wants me to believe, wants me to stay busy running after, but in the act of allowing myself to Be Here Right Now. 
This is what the space allows. This is my challenge of finding Home. Finding me. 

I melt into the quiet as the fog lifts and I breathe in the Now, sigh out the Then.

And breathe in again.

Gratitude

Summer. I am watching sun filter through old planks of a barn, prayer flags faded and torn, old couches softly decaying in still light. My desk is an old board nailed to sawed off two by fours, light green paint chipping and floating to join the pine needles and crunchy leaves on the dusty floor. Mosquitoes fill the evening-lit air with motion; a thousand specks of life and movement, no reason, no destination.

I am full of gratitude for this past week (and for this year, this life, but I will be specific in an effort to name my joy). This is how:

I am grateful for home-made, home-picked blackberry pie bubbling over and through buttery crust pressed into a cast iron skillet and the smell that fills the house as it bakes.

For the voices of a dozen men and women gathering on the front porch last night to do nothing but sing melodies and harmonies, sing for singing’s sake, sing for the pleasure of listening.

For a discussion at a potluck on that same porch nights before that ended with a promise to think about shooting deer in her backyard to dress, store, and eat for the winter. And how many island gatherings have had conversations centering around self-sufficiency and efficiently and sustainably maintaining an omnivorous diet in non-conventional (but really traditional) ways.

For a swing in the trees that makes my stomach drop every time as my body flies out of the forest and over the road far below.

For telling fantastical stories after the candles are blown out, the darkness ringing with bright laughter. And singing softly to sleepy ears upon waking.

For a house full of lovely people who grow vegetables and make food and call for community in so many different ways.

For the opportunity to open myself ever more deeply to love and connection in all of its various forms.

For bone broth soup made with beef from cows raised less than a mile away and veggies from the garden I help to grow.

For dolphins (porpoises?) surfacing in the sound as my kayak paddles touch glassy cold water. 

For dancing and running and leaping on the beach reminding me that all we are meant to do in this life is have fun and that fun comes in many different forms as does love and pain and growth.

For a tree rotting from within shepherded reverently from sky to ground.

For sleeping outside underneath the stars, underneath a bright moon, circled by a quiet army of trees, circled by quiet arms.

For sipping dream tea in the evenings, laps covered in quilts, bullfrogs shouting stories across the pond, owls questioning everything.