The woods are dry as tinder. The water swell in the brooks is low, and seasonal streams are dried up. Fortunately, the snowmelt was abundant, but we'll need some real spring rains soon. The forest is alive with birdsong, and blossoms, and young buds. The wild leeks (ramps) are good this year, despite the arid spring.
April is my overload month, it always has been. But even when a serious hike is out of the question, it's still possible to take refuge in the silence of the forest. Hike in at any point; leave the road noise out of earshot; find a spot where you could imagine setting up camp, an alluring woodland place, one that speaks to you. (For me, the ideal spot usually includes big rocks and hemlocks.) Then just sit there, preferably on a comfortable mossy rock, for at least twenty minutes in total silence. But seriously, it has to be a full twenty minutes, no less.
There are about half a dozen reasons to go to the woods. Discovery, adventure, beauty, and exercise. I go for all those reasons, but mostly for silence. And when a hike is unspectacular, or rushed, or commonplace, it's still possible to take in the quiet. Twenty minutes of forest silence gets into your spirit, and then for the next four or five days, you can continue to live off it. That wild silence gets stored away in your marrow and slowly emanates from you throughout the coming week. It makes you more patient, and calmer, serene like the wizened Dr. Joel Fleischmann in the last lingering episodes of Northern Exposure.
Heck, if you can't get your silence fresh from the forest, any old silence would surely do the trick. You could probably find it by spending twenty minutes in your guest room closet, too. How is it that people forget their need for silence, and stillness, and solitude? I love people. I truly do. Loving people and "hearing" them is what I do in life. But sometimes I think I love them most when they stop talking.
I like this post a lot. For me, it speaks to finding ways to being at peace with odd, mysterious things. Sort of like this quote from our favorite right now, David Lynch: "My father was a scientist for the Forest Service. He would drive me through the woods in his green Forest Service truck, over dirt roads, through the most beautiful forests where the trees are very tall and shafts of sunlight come down and in the mountain streams the rainbow trout leap out and their little trout sides catch glimpses of light. Then my father would drop me in the woods and go off. It was a weird, comforting feeling being in the woods. There were odd, mysterious things. That`s the kind of world I grew up in."
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