“And so I go into the woods,” said the poet Wendell Berry, more than once and in many ways. He went into the woods to find solace from a world in turmoil. In this season of this year, so do I.
With no apologies for a little repetition from last week…and so I go into the woods, the smallest of woods, a city wood, an old plantation allowed a little wildness now. The wildness of growing and falling as it will, trunks crash-landing across footpaths and left. No forensic clean-up teams. Limbs outstretched but not demanding anything, now.
Just welcoming the fungi, just surrendering the weight of living, that had become too much.
There is such a fragile thing as a single leaf caught on a single spider spun thread, dangling mid-space. This one is framed by trees against a window of sky, but I fail to catch it adequately, photograph it properly, preserve a moment that was simply meant to be observed, and maybe only by me…a single leaf on a gossamer thread…still glowing, floating, spinning in mid-air, not falling.
In the city wood – Twenty Acre Wood since you ask – I have no idea whether there are still that many acres, but I like the name. It makes me think of Pooh and Piglet and Eeyore and Tigger and all the Tao and Te and Zen exuberance we lost when we grew up. In the city wood on an unplanned wander, I come across carvings of the green man, hung on trees, unsignposted,
unclaimed, simply there to be seen if we bother to look. I come across obstructions and unexpected ways. I come across myself. Again.
And I come across that single thread-caught leaf and try, and try, and try, to catch it with a camera and an unsteady hand, and it keeps spinning, and I keep failing.
A runner sprints past and looks back at this weird woman seemingly trying to photograph thin air. Perhaps I am. He did not see the leaf. Not falling. Just spinning, in mid-air.
I think of Annie. Spinning. We saw her. Tried to capture her if not catch her. But gossamer threads have their tensile breaking points. And the leaves must fall. Unseen.
I posted the inadequate photograph anyway. That seemed to matter.
The week moves forward and two days later I am led into the woods again. A different wood, a familiar wood, Bayfield.
We walk up the path where we have seen bluebells in the Spring, but this is October. Up to the fallen rowan tree, that has rotten further each time we come and is now so weak we can no longer sit upon her fallen limbs. Up to where we remember foxgloves in a Summer day’s dreaming.
The wood is always familiar and always different. Even my oak changes – but then again, I stalk him differently each time. These days I rarely approach as supplicant, creeping from below…I wander about his wider space, and descend upon him from above, staking my own claim to his presence. Oh, I love and respect him still, and welcome our reclaimed fellowship every time…but this youngling, this mere human, maybe, feels a need to say look more closely because we fast-lived things also change. I want the tree to see me.
I visit other trees. Look at branches and leaves and trunks and shadows and the spaces in between. None of it would exist without that negative space, the gaps that define the edges where one thing defines itself and in doing so outlines the backdrop, the suppport structure. I think of words that have become devalued. Poisoned. Earth-scorched. Lebensraum. Other. And find no substitues. We hurt ourselves when we undermine our language.
It is Autumn. The leaves are falling. It is dry, but not bone dry, nor is there yet the mist-dampened mulching of Autumn-cum-Winter. It is, perhaps, still Indian Summer. Early sea-fret threatened a day of unrained drenching, but the ocean took it back again. We walked up that shallow incline, to be among the trees, to be where the light fell unexpected, to seek the solace of quiet tree-breath.
This was not a walk of my choosing. Hardly a walk at all to be fair. We stroll up the incline and wander and sit and talk to trees and think about poets and poetry and about the world and about loss – and we thread our questions on the gossamer strands that hold half-fallen leaves between the branch and the earth. We find more of these here. Rather Chris finds a couple, held together as a pair, and is pleased to be able to show them to me. Two strands almost heart-shaped in their joining, almost invisible, and the two leaves entwined at the meeting point.
I gather fallen things. A ghost bluebell, that won’t survive the trip home, a leaf, another grey feather – grey for peace after storms – a pine cone, its seeds already scattered. I gather the silence of the wood, the spaces between scurryings and singings and people chattering and footsteps, I press that inside the pages with the leaf and the feather and the seedhead that will not survive the journey. Memories of the wood that I am not privy to: I never saw that flower bloom, or scented the pine in Spring nor made tea from its tips, nor did I see the wing from which that feather fell, or the branch that gave up its leaf.
The wood tells me it is ok to take these things.
I write about the wisdom of trees.
But the wood is more than trees. It is earth and sky and leaf-mould and soil and scurryings and singings and light-bursts and mosaics and noise and silence and fungus and insects and bark and age-smoothed dead limbs and bouncing and wave-form and fluttering falling things, and drifting on air things, and dogs barking, and people bickering or whispering or praying. The wood is a church full of worship and gossip. Sanctity and laughter.
The wood waits and asks us what we need.
Today – 6th October 2026, since you ask – the wood teaches me, not so much to let go of things, but to let them go on their way, to free them, to release them. Some will stay and nourish what comes next. Some will fly away and best we let them do so. And, who knows, some may return, but differently. We will not know the oak sapling from the acorn we let lie, we will not know the beech trunk from the turkey tail that grows around its vanished circumference, the whispering of the
woods is telling me to accept that I will not know. It also tells me that it is a good thing to pick up things along the way, to take home in place of the memory of a walk that may yet escape me.
A short walk it was. Up among the trees, on a warm October day, with the leaf-fall still golden, only half-dry, and much green still filtering the light.
~ ~ ~
