The Woods: A Place Where I Learned the Fear of God

When I was ten years old, I used to stop and think how incredible it was that I existed. Wonder is irreducible. It wasn’t as if we were just born. We were brought into the world.

When I was seventeen years old, I spent one sweltering summer afternoon hiking the old trails in the Wildlife Refuge behind the Vo-Tech. Smith Lake runs into a stream and parallels one of the paths, and an empty well opens up in between the two, blanketed in moss, forgotten. Purple leaves sop in its floor, the green grass bites over the rim and drops down an inch or two into the stone paneled inseam. I crossed the stream with the well in mind, shoes linked across my neck, the water leaping in tiny shoots to stain the ends of my shorts. Sand rocks jammed playfully in between my toes and the mud that crowned the bank was collapsing bit by bit in strips and chunks. After clambering up the bank, I tacked my shoes to my feet, scrutinized the woods, and spotted the well sinking into the forest floor. The well isn’t big. I remember my kindergarten class ogled at it on a field trip once, wondering wat it would be like to fall into those unsearchable depths, giving amateur predictions of how far it went down, inventing morbid legends about the people who had fallen in years before. (they got rescued) As I continued to stand there, panting from the hike, absorbing the settling silence of the woods, filing through the memories of the well, I began to feel afraid. I had gone through something similar in rare moments in the past. It was the strange feeling of being alone, but at the same time sharing in someone one else’s presence.

In the children’s book The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, two animal friends, Mole and Rat, explore their local wilderness in search of a lost baby otter. Along their journey down the riverbank and into the forest, they hear a lingering trill of music that leads them into an encounter with a beautiful, mysterious “river-god,” who is playing a pan pipe and protecting the baby otter within its “hooves.” Mole and Rat stop in their tracks and marvel. They experience that strange sense of fear too, not the kind that tells your body to run away, but one that naturally bends toward awe, curiosity, and captivation. The Spirit meets eyes with the animals, deepening the reality of its sweet and heavy presence, furthering the fearful beauty of the moment. I relate this delightful chapter (titled The Piper at the Gates of Dawn) to my experience in the Wildlife Refuge. I never did see any river-god or anything like that, but nonetheless I did share Rat and Mole’s reverence for some evident, pressing personhood. It wasn’t my sentiments toward the elven mythic of The Lord of the Rings, nor my admiration of the tree nymphs from Narnia that grounded the wonder. I could just tell that I wasn’t alone, that the silence and the periodic rustling of the wind in the trees and the babble of the brook, in the moment, called for a deeper awareness. I thought it interesting how I hadn’t started out hiking with a pilgrimage in mind. I was just hiking around. I continued to stand in place, searching through the columns of trees and guards of underbrush, their color and complexity blushing and uniting with the sheen of the water. I could hear an array of noises but found myself in deep silence at the same time. Whether it was the presence of God I tasted, which is what my intuitions lean toward, or was just a moment in time when the size of beauty became bigger than the size of my mind, I can’t say.

I think of Nature, how inviolate, warm, and inviting it is in the Spring and Summer. However comforting Nature can be as a respite from routine or a haven to dock in after being subject to worldly storms, there is a moment when Nature itself seems to be subordinate to a higher Nature, when it seems to bow in reverence like children bowing palm leaves across the road. Call me wistful, full of empty hopes, but I see it in my mind that denying the depth of these times is like denying the fact that candy is sweet, or love is pleasurable. The feelings and perceptions themselves may not verify the validity of those mysterious seconds in the woods, but those leanings may indicate our capacity to reflect on the possible vicinities outside of Nature, and so verify some divine, calling presence.

Like George MacDonald stresses in his fairy tales, and how C.S. Lewis responded to those stories on his road to Christian conversion, waking up from the dream, leaving the fearful, wonderful mystery, doesn’t darken the mundane elements of the normal world. It brightens them. It may even uncover some previously disregarded glories. I walked out of those woods sweaty and tired, probably speckled with ticks. I went on a solitary adventure, though, and it seemed to have paid off in full. Almost a year later, I still remember the sound of silence in the woods, in the hills, and the weirdest thing is I don’t even think I was trying to listen for it.