Consider the trilliums

The gloom started lifting the minute my car swung around the curve and I saw the gate to Lake Katharine opened wide as if in welcome. If ever there was a time when I needed to immerse myself in nature, this is it.

Each day I feel more blue, even though things are going well enough under the circumstances: we're still fully employed and healthy, classes are carrying on as well as can be expected, and, thanks to the wonders of Zoom, we even got to sing Happy Birthday to our youngest grandchild when she turned two yesterday. But so much is still missing from our lives right now: hugs from the grandkids, visits with friends, trips to the store, impromptu discussions with students in the hallways. 

Like everyone else, I'm living a compartmentalized life, dividing the home into work and leisure zones, seeing friends and family in little Brady Bunch blocks on a computer screen and finding it difficult to make connections across the void or bring the different pieces of life into harmony. Even my attention span seems fragmented, my mind constantly jumping from one online task to the next, constantly worrying over broken bits of everyday life and wondering when they'll ever be normal again. But when I went to Lake Katharine this morning and walked through the woods and down into the gorge, the pieces started coming together.

There's no Zoom in the woods and few distractions; in a nearly two-hour walk, the only other person I saw was a jogger running nimbly up a muddy slope I was struggling not to slide down. I stepped aside to let him pass and then went on my way through woods that felt familiar: this is the place where I saw the bluebells last year, and here I should look for trout lilies. I heard a hawk and a pileated woodpecker and unknown numbers of phoebes, and down at the marsh I heard the call of a Louisiana waterthrush, exactly where I'd heard one at this time last year.

Names of wildflowers came back to me unbidden as I greeted them as old friends: Dutchman's breeches and Jacob's ladder and blue cohosh looking, as usual, like something beamed in from outer space. Consider the trilliums: our spring so far has been cold, wet, and windy, and the coronavirus has turned human communities upside down, but down in the woods the trilliums are coming up all the same, thriving on damp hillsides and turning their pure white blossoms toward the light.

That's why I go to the woods: to turn away from the flickering lights of the computer monitor and the transient fragments that fill our lives now and find a place that feels whole and unperturbed and full of peace. Just last week I reminded my students, apropos of something we'd been reading, that the words whole and health and holy all derive from the same Old English root, and while the entire world obsesses over how to stay healthy, we do well to work on wholeness and holiness as well. 

That's why I go to the woods: to find a place that feels whole, where I can turn my face to the light and find peace.

Down into the gorge.

Salt Creek.

Solomon's Seal, just starting out.

Bloodroot.

Blue cohosh. Freaky!

Fiddleheads!

Dutchman's breeches.

Mayapples, just popping up.

Bluebells are on the way!

I don't know what these flowers are and I couldn't get any closer.

Two Canada geese were sounding a loud alarm about something.

Trillium!

I think this is Jacob's Ladder.

Trout lilies! Saw lots of leaves but few blossoms.