I’m walking the trails in Pacific Spirit Park, a woodland nature preserve in the University of British Columbia endowment lands, not far from where I grew up in the student family housing. It is a wet, green world, fragrant with cedar and moss.
I know these trails well. At least, I thought I did. Some of them have been rerouted in recent years and I find myself relying on the signposted maps more than I expected to. The old and familiar is commingling with the new and strange, and that seems fitting for this moment.
I’m in Vancouver to help my mom with some medical and practical needs. At 82, she’s the most happily solitary person I know. She lives alone and she rarely asks for help. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t need it. Her body is slowing down, her sofa is falling apart, and almost everything in her apartment needs fixing, cleaning, replacing, or throwing out. I’m here for it.
As she leaned on my arm the other day, putting one careful foot in front of the other, she said, “Isn’t this funny? It seems not so long ago that I was helping you with everything, and now here you are helping me.”
I loved escaping to these woods as a child. Nature is a mad, magical world where children and animals with supernatural powers can roam free. The stories of Enid Blyton, Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis left me pining for my own magic wardrobe or rabbit hole, a portal through which to escape from the carpeted world of math homework, afternoon reruns of Gilligan’s Island, and ads for toys and vacations we couldn’t afford. A world in which I could not take away my mother’s grief and stress but could definitely make both worse, and usually did. I wished I could make a home for myself among the ferns and roots where the flower fairies live, the home of druids and witches.
At seven, I joined the Brownies. The rather pagan centerpiece of the initiation ceremony was a symbolic visit to a magical pool. Two older Brownies led me blindfolded into a circle of girls and, holding me by the shoulders, turned me around three times while I recited the incantation: “Twist me and turn me and show me the elf. I look in the water and there see…” this was my cue to open my eyes and look down to see my reflection in the pool, completing the rhyme with “myself”.
The fact that the “magical pool” was really just a mirror and some plastic toadstools on the floor of a church basement made this rite of passage no less sacred to me. I understood that my promise “to do my best; to do my duty to God, the Queen, and my country; to help other people everyday, especially those at home” was a pledge not to the Girl Guides of Canada but to an ancient, wild presence, and I took it solemnly.
***
In 2010, a close friend of mine went missing in Stanley Park. A group of our friends fanned out to search for him, and one of us found his body hanging from a tree. The guy from the municipal search and rescue team told me that an average of four people take their lives in that park every weekend. This seemed to be a very high number to me. But it also made sense. Where else would you go when you are desperate for sanctuary? The world of men can be a punishing place, but nature will always embrace you without judgment. In the woods you can be a drunk, a vagabond, a suicidally depressed person. A loner, a dreamer, a magical creature. A child hiding from the call to dinner.
Nature heals. Whatever you’re trying to rid yourself of, there is a sense that if you bury it underground, the magical earth will digest it and turn it into soil so it can become food for new life. Of course, our species has taken this way too far, but this isn’t meant to be an ecological essay. What I’m trying to say is that the instinct that drives us to bury our rubbish and our dead is the same one that draws us to bring our troubles to the woods, the beach, the mountaintop, the desert.
The first time I recall experiencing the mute sentience of the natural world was around the age of nine. I was on my way to school, trudging along the gravel path past a small patch of woodland near my house. Clumps of wet brown leaves stuck to my shoes, reminding me of the soggy bran flakes at the bottom of my cereal bowl. The morning was dark, drizzly, and cold. My backpack kept slipping off my raincoated shoulders.
My eyes were sore and itchy from crying. A dull ache in my left bicep evidenced the grip of my mother’s fingers. We’d had a big screaming match that morning, like so many mornings. Her sharp words ricocheted inside my head while my own words stuck in my throat like a splintered chicken bone.
I was lost in my wretchedness, heavy-hearted and weary.
As I approached the bus stop on University Boulevard, I looked up at the black-green conifers towering over the road, and I had the distinct sense that they were looking back at me. Something inside of me unclenched. In an instant, the tension in my body drained away and was replaced by an oceanic patience.
I felt as though I was meeting the gaze of a trusted friend in the midst of a melee. I see you, the trees seemed to say. It’s going to be ok. In fact, it’s ok now — I am with you, and I am larger than all of this.
In that moment I felt with certainty that the world around me was alive, aware, and profoundly unperturbed. Not only the trees, and the gravel path, and the sodden leaves, but even the cars streaking past me in the rain, their headlights cutting through the gray gloom. Under the gaze of this omniscient, loving witness, a sense of calm flooded my whole body.
The best way I’ve found to describe this experience is that it felt like the wind blew through me. Suddenly I was no longer a stressed out kid who’d spent the morning fighting with her mom. I was peace itself, suspended in timelessness. I was the tree who stood watch over me.
And then the bus came. I stepped aboard, dropped fifteen cents into the box, and carried on to the fourth grade and the rest of my life.
***
On the last day of my trip, my mother and I drive out to UBC to see the place where we lived all those years ago.
The house is gone. The concrete steps in front of our row of townhouses are still there, and the tree that I used to swing from still stands. The path that leads to the bus stop is there, too, but the building it once ran alongside has been replaced by a grassy hillock.
The footprint of our old home looks impossibly tiny. My childhood world was vast and its events titanic. How is it possible that so much drama played out in those few square meters of earth?
I turn to my mother and time folds in on itself like an accordion. Here in the passenger seat of my rental car sits the same woman I fought with so bitterly in the fourth grade, yet neither of us is the same person we were back then. As I sit with my aging mother in my own aging body and feel the collapsing of time and space, it’s clear to me that we exist in multiple realms at once.
My inner nine-year-old is preserved in the amber of my own imagination. Her pain and frustration are fresh in my memory. The bran flakes. The aching arm. The path to school. The sentient trees. She lives, loves, hurts, and heals entirely in my own mind.
So does the thirteen year old version of me, the twenty-eight year old, and the thirty-five year old. All these characters are essential to the plot of this human drama I’m walking through. Each adds her own tale to the saga, but none is the whole story.
I don’t hold any illusion that the version of me that’s writing these words is any less ephemeral. Tonight when I lie down to sleep she will fall away as naturally as a leaf drifts to the forest floor, and her story will become the soil from which a new version of me will sprout tomorrow.
Watching over it all and loving me through my days I feel that same omniscient eye, vast and patient as the earth itself.
I see you. I love you. I’m with you — and I am larger than all of this.
Your story resonates both because of the calm nature brings to ones soul but also how one can hold onto memory so viscerally yet know that that as you say is only a fractured part of you. The more expressed, the more the pain is undone, for we are more than memory, we are healing.
This resonates to closely to my connection with the ALL from such a young age. It shows that if we are open we can find our way. I was always called the daydreamer at school because I would be connecting with the unseen creatures and wardens of this earth instead of learning the lessons in class.