I have just returned from my first long meander through the forest here. My third morning waking in this cabin in the woods. I am alone. Spencer and Rudder are with my Dad at the old farmhouse packing up some odds and ends and left me here to recharge my batteries a bit after three extremely full days of early rising, hastily packing, moving boxes and furniture, plenty of restaurant food and constant trips between the storage unit in Duluth, the farmhouse and the cabin.
These woods are still brand new to me. I spent the last five years traipsing around ten familiar acres from the farmhouse — north toward the birches, a slight left down a small hill into a great open field lined with tall, old red and white pines, passed my favorite pussy willow, to the north corner of the field and then south, into the forest. Down the river, back east into the cedar grove, through a fairy portal, into the field, then north, up the hill and back home. A walk I am certain will be etched in my memory forever.
I now have 20 acres plus a long dirt drive and road to explore. With a combination of five different marked trails to wander through. I am not familiar with them. My body not yet knowing the turns and the roots and the rocks. Which is the most exciting part of this new adventure.
When I’m in the woods, in a new place, I like to enter without a plan. It has always felt more exciting to let my body decide where she wants to go, where she feels magnetized. Sometimes toward the sun or the moon, sometimes toward the rustling of leaves, sometimes into the dark. Moving in this way opens me up to trees and plants that would like to reach out, to birds that have a message, or chance encounters that shift and expand my understanding of the world around me.
On my first night here after a trip to the outhouse I told the woods, “I like to be spoken to through wind and birdsong” then closed my eyes to listen. And not to my surprise at all, I heard a rustle in the drying poplar leaves above my head, first gentle, tumbling into a grand crescendo of applause I felt rattle through my chest and belly and hips, up my neck and through the crown of my head. A smile spread across my face and I whispered “why hello, there.”
I have slept here only three nights and already, I am changing. Already, intention is imbued into my every movement. Brushing my teeth, I use water sparingly as I do in the wilderness. Turning off lamps when they aren’t being used because the last few days have been cloudy and our solar panels need more light to charge the batteries that power our new home.
I know some of this intentionality is born of nuance. This is a brand new way. The mindfulness is baked in. Yet, I hope I never lose this. I hope that intention does not become mundane. That heating the kettle on the wood stove so that I can wash my dishes never loses its magic.
This kind of life requires more effort. But it is the kind of effort that lights up a tired body or a weary soul.
Today I wandered through a brand new wood. I met a teenaged birch who told me he would love to teach me how to listen to the wind and really hear it. I met a great white spruce who knew no gender. That only stood old and tall and did not speak but let me feel a great and ancient strength my human body may never have known otherwise. And as I made my way out of the forest and back to the dirt drive, I found the poplars that watch over my new favorite trail, their leaves still quaking golden in the sun. As I raised my visage upward, a great wind whistled out of the north and in my heart I heard it say, “Welcome to the wood.”