I took myself to the woods this Sabbath. The 90º+ temps finally broke this week, and a daytime hike in the woods was long overdue.

One quarter-mile down the South Creek Trail, I was crying. The moss was squishy, the sunlight dappled, the air cool, the soil scented, the creek giggling. I was overwhelmed by joy – and maybe even frightened. Joy had startled me, in her easy way. I wasn’t quite sure how to hold her. My mind suspected she’d arrive again, but my heart hadn’t dared to hope she’d make another appearance. I wept in gratitude of living among beauty; I wept because I was afraid it would slip away.

I love to be in the woods, for loving things that cannot love me back is a special kind of comfort. I’ve never tried to impress a tree; just the thought of it is preposterous, given a tree’s innate grandeur. There is no temptation to perform for a flower, no hesitation or minced words with a lichen-covered rock. Just a stillness, an immeasurable capacity to hold all I have and still have room for more.

I’m never too much in the woods.

I am never more grounded and whole than when my palm rests on a stone wall, than when my fingers graze textured bark of trunks reaching for the cloudless sky, than when I am bathed by the impossible quiet cacophony of a babbling stream. The leaf-littered ground below me holds me, steady.

A patch of sunlight drew me in to eat my sandwich and let my heart listen to the stream. I stayed for three hours: reading, reflecting, remembering, resting. I napped and shivered and swayed and hoped. Yes, that dangerous thing – hope.
I hoped to keep this attention to my place in the family of things.
I hoped to continue to thrill in the softness of trailside moss (yes, I did stoop to press my cheek into it), to bend down to inspect a shiny acorn or a suitable home for a vole, to take three hours to travel one mile.
I hoped to remember to slow down often, to relish my own company in the space between sky and soil, hemmed in by sycamores and rhododendrons.
I hoped to keep planting myself squarely in the path of real life, where joy finds me, instead of me chasing her; it’s much more rewarding to be found.

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I recently attended an event which provided ample opportunity for me to face my insecurities – those shadowy thoughts that tell me I’m unwanted, unworthy, unliked; simultaneously and paradoxically too much and not enough. It was a space that invited me to face the shame of remembering a harmful pattern of sacrificing authenticity on the altar of connection. I am so grateful to note that I attended that event and left feeling fully myself. No chasing, no shrinking, no hiding; neither self-aggrandizing nor self-abandonment.

Just Jess.

That’s who the woods allow me to be, too.

I’m so glad to greet myself again. It’s been a long time coming.

Here’s to the fright and delight of both joy and hope.
Here’s to learning to love again – to live again.
Here’s to going through loss to finally be found.