Mother Woods

I think it is safe to say my mother is a magician. My father simply calls her, “The Universe.”

The woods are her workshop, and she keeps the trail clear. Sometimes when I stay there, I’ll wake at early light just in time to catch sight of her out my bedroom window, hooded and heading into the trees with a pair of loppers and her loyal hound. She resembles Artemis, ageless and graceful in the twilight of morning.

She holds degrees in biology, mathematics, and nursing. In her life she has worked as a nursery farmer, a teacher, a native plant botantist, and as a nurse caring for babies and mothers.

I find the forest where she lives to be a sanctuary. Sunlight filters through moss-covered maples and cedars droop softness toward a floor dotted with gigantic prehistoric sword ferns. Though the woods are small and development threatens, there is today ample birdsong, lush quiet, an occasional deer or coyote, and abundant stillness.

On Christmas Day at dusk I ventured in alone. Winter solstice thins the veil between the topside world where we feel painfully separated from one another, and the truth—that we are not. Some call this experience of the mystery between us holy, and of course it is. But the woods know this is how it always has been. 

What is wild has the patience of eons, epochs, eternity.

Biologically speaking, every tree in a forest is linked by a vast and ancient underground network of fungal lines. We now know this is one way they communicate, one way they defend the forest from invasive insects, and one way they work together to survive periodic drought. Energy in the form of slow electromagnetic pulses move through the strings of subterranean fungi like little mailmen, carrying messages in much the same way as human hearts beating.

Imagine for a moment that you can see reality. I know it seems crazy because we humans are so limited by our bodies, our sensory organs are only equipped to notice and process a miniscule morsel of truth, but indulge me.

Imagine you can see reality and you see that there is and always has been a great, vast, intelligent being that inhabits the earth in the form of plant life. She gave birth to animal creatures many ages ago. They have been feeding from her ever since. Soon the creatures became human, and developed a sort of pseudo-consciousness, a level of awareness that gives them the idea that they are separate and distinct from this intelligent being, and even that they can somehow manipulate her.

They are brash little creatures, but she loves them (she created them) so she watches. Humans have been here for 200,000 years or so at most. She has lived—and will continue to live—for more than one hundred million. Humans are not necessarily her magnum opus. We are a curious blip on the radar of an infinite consciouness that is so much greater and more expansive than we are capable of knowing or understanding.

If and when the last human is gone, wiped out by our inability to overcome fear and the shortcomings of an evolving brain, she will still be here. The network of consciousness that is every plant, tree, fungus, algae, and lichen on the earth will live on. 

Imagine what is wild. It has this patience.

December maple leaves crunched beneath my feet. Wrapping the pink cashmere shawl around my shoulders for more warmth, I paused in the middle of the trail to gaze at the arboreal sky and breathe. My mother’s gentle dog came to sit at my feet, leaning her warm body against my calf with a sigh. I closed my eyes and placed one hand on my heart to feel it beating. 

Soon in the quiet, a steady voice came and I heard myself incant an invitation to the spirits of the cardinal directions: first North, East, South, then West. I asked them one by one for protection, vision, light, and courage. Their gifts arrived seemingly instantaneously, and the holiday-induced madness inside my body shifted to calm. The effect of a magician’s woodsy workshop is real.

My mother’s woods hold me in a way I have longed to be held ever since I outgrew her arms. In the decade and some years since she and my father moved here, the land has also come to represent a sort of new understanding for me that we can weave our own sense of belonging to a place by caring for it and developing a relationship that honors and respects its wild nature.

We are all connected to and deeply nourished by wild spaces. Something sonorous within us calls to be in them because we are of the earth.

A significant part of my experience of womanhood and entering my mid-forties has been hearing this call and recognizing that—standing rooted in my most feminine qualities—I can choose to be a caretaker of what is wild.

The entreaty of the wild is not quiet; it beckons with resounding urgency. Yet the call also lands as a golden invitation, a request to use our creative powers for good, live life thoughtfully, learn as much as we can, touch the earth with our bare hands more often, and shine our light.

It is said the DNA of displaced generations carries the signature of our ancestoral places. We recognize the nature, the music, the artwork, and the folklore in much the same way we would recognize a long-lost family member we have never met.

My great-grandparents were born in Iceland. When my mother first moved to this new forest in the Pacific Northwest, a neighboring artist crafted two stone huldufolk for her. Huldufolk are rock people in Icelandic folklore. They are playful creatures, dressed in green and other bright colors. Children know to watch for them.

Huldufolk protect the land and teach us to hold deep reverence for its mystery. My mother’s artistry and her magic have revealed to me the soft power of this respect.

If I am ever to become the caretaker for a piece of land—no matter how large or small—I hope to do as she has done, and as countless others have done before: To protect what is wild, honor it as our birthplace, and keep the trail clear.