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When I was a kid, I used to play in woods behind my house. Seventy years later, I play in the woods behind my house.

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My woods these days, operated by the Brunswick/Topsham Land Trust, encompass five miles of trails that wind through deep forest and Sandplain Grassland, along and across creeks and pools, past an active farm and a community garden. One trail leads to a stone quarry, another to a stone labyrinth.

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Every now and then, I’ll reread one of Thomas Hardy’s novels—Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Return of the Native. What I especially like, because it’s so true for me, is that in his novels the setting is a living character more than an inert backdrop.

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For me, the woods are feminine. I understand why nature is called Mother. Entering the vaginate opening to a woodland trail is for me both sacred and sensual. I feel embraced by silence and the fecund smells of pulsating life.

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Two years ago, one late afternoon, I had just finished walking the labyrinth in the woods, when a young man and woman came down the path. He carried several cameras and she was dressed in some kind of long, flowing dress, not something you usually see in the Maine woods.

He said hello, and then walked past me, ignoring the labyrinth itself to the stones in the center. “Yeah, these will be great.”

He helped her stand on one of the stones and began taking pictures. I walked away but as the trail turned, I looked back to see her thrust a leg out from the dress. When the trail turned again, I looked back through the woods to see a naked back and the dress down to her waist. Fighting the urge to remain, I kept walking but couldn’t resist one final last glance back to behold her standing nude on top of the stone bench.

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Two monarch butterflies are playing tag in the blueberry bushes and the bracken on Sandplain Grassland. I’d never paid much attention to bracken until after Mary Lee and I hiked St. Cuthbert’s Way in Scotland and England. There these ferns grow tall and thick and as we hiked through, we talked about that scene involving a phallic sword in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd where Bathsheba Everdeen meets Sargent Troy in a hollow surrounded by bracken. Then, when we returned to Maine and walked these trails, I noticed all kinds of the stuff (bracken, not swords).

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Looking over the bracken and blueberries, I see the sprawling brick building where I taught for my last two years as a high school English teacher. If I look closely I can see myself looking out the window of my classroom to where I’m standing now, wondering what it would be like to be here, looking back at the high school. Our eyes meet. Mr. Wile tells me how he envies my freedom to be able to walk these trails on a Thursday morning; I tell him how proud I am that he’s a teacher.

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The B/T Land Trust maintains a number of bridges in these woods. Perhaps because of having been a teacher for forty-five years in high school, college, adult ed programs, homeless shelters, and churches, I find bridges represent what teaching is all about: providing a way for someone to cross from where they are to where they want or need to be.

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As much people seem to want to complicate my job, teaching for me has always been simply me saying to others, “See that? Isn’t that neat?”

And when I see the eyes light up, or someone says, “Yes! I get it. It is neat!” the feeling I get is right up there with sex.

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Part of the trail loop behind the high school is used for cross country meets and in the years B.C. (Before COVID) someone spray-painted the roots across the trail every autumn, making them easier to see to avoid turning an ankle.

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Roots fascinate me, especially the mycelium, the underground fungus network that enables trees to increase their functional root surface so they can take in twice the nutrients they could with just their roots alone. The fungus not only penetrates and envelops the tree’s roots, but also allows its web to roam through the surrounding forest floor, connect with other trees’ fungal partners and roots. A network is created, and now it’s easy for the trees to exchange vital nutrients and even information.

Although I don’t much like to think of myself as a fungus, it’s another good image of what teachers do.

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Crystal Springs Farm trails have no grand vistas, no purple mountains’ majesty, no waves crashing upon rugged rocks. The beauty here is subtle and often partially hidden under branches and bracken: lady slippers, star flowers, violets. It’s a delicate beauty, reminding me how delicate and beautiful life itself is.

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And often overshadowed by death. Sometimes, when I walk in the woods after a storm, I will find a tree blown down across the trail. Fallen trees, especially large fallen trees, fill me with awe. These trees are usually a hundred or so years old and they leave an emptiness that hasn’t been there for a century. I think of the trees that have fallen across my paths through the years—plans that have blown down, a marriage that rotted and died, a daughter struck down before she’d fully grown, and the emptiness I still feel.

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Many of the dead and dying tree trunks are split and broken in strange and grotesque and even beautiful ways. Not unlike some of broken people I know who are among the most beautiful people I’ve ever met.

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But if life itself in these woods is delicate, the desire for new life here is robust. In a matter of weeks, new growth replaces the emptiness in the forest after a tree goes, and when a tree falls across the path blocking my way, it doesn’t take long for another path to develop around it. I’ve been responsible for some of those new paths, just as I’ve had to carve out other new paths in my life around downed dreams and broken relationships. All of which have led to me to where I am now, and for which I give thanks.

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“… if nature’s cruelties know no limits,

neither do the boundaries of its grace.”— Laurie-Anne Bosselaar

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Most of my walks begin or end at a pond between where I live and the entrance to the B/T Land Trust Trails. I don’t think anything so makes me aware of the rhythm of shifting seasons as this pond: peepers here in the spring, ducks in early summer, mud and discarded toys in late summer, variegated foliage and yellowed grasses in the fall, and a white expanse of the snow in the winter. From tadpoles to broad tailed hawks and blue herons, from green buds to orange and red leaves, from kids (and at least one adult I know) sailing pieces of wood on its waters to kids (and at least one adult) making snow angels on its ice, this pond sings of both change and continuity.

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Soapbox time: We have a lot to learn from trees and roots and the mycelia, ponds and mud and grasses and wildlife. In the face of the rampant individualism that’s scaring the hell out of me these days, I think the world needs a new and deeper sense of connectedness. I don’t reject either the special gifts or the unique spiritual journeys of each person, but I’d love to see each of us, each “I,” dive into the very roots of our being—dive down into the ground to the point where our trunk spreads its roots organically into the branching mycelium network of “We.”

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For over thirty years, one of my favorite writing assignments has been to ask people to describe their querencia, a Spanish word meaning the place from where you draw your strength; where you feel at home; the place where you are your most authentic self.

            I’ve told you mine. What’s yours?

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