The Voice of Life

This afternoon the children and I went out to my sister’s property to do a little ‘nature study’ for our homeschool work. It warmed up again into the mid-sixties, with some hazy sun and a gusty Spring wind. We checked out the pond and found  a lot of frog eggs that looked like long, transparent worms filled with black dots wound around weeds and sticks under the water. I don’t recall seeing long, stringy egg sacks like this before; usually frog eggs are in big globs. They were cool looking!

Fiona brought her notebook and a pencil, and we sat now and then as she wrote down the names of things we saw. By the time we went home she had written: willow pollen; frog eggs; fragmitis; cattails; deer tracks (lots of those); giant hill; lamb’s ear; holes; dandelions (the first we’ve seen this season); stones; May apples. After leaving the pond we’d climbed the tall grassy hill nearby that has many woodchuck holes in it. Arthur and Fiona both liked standing on top, enjoying the lovely view of green fields and being buffeted by the ferocious, not-quite-chilly wind. We also saw what I’m pretty sure now were coyote tracks in the mud beside the pond amid hundreds of deer prints.

Then it was off across the wide, short grass of a hay-field and into the woods where I’ve gone for over forty years. May Apples were popping up all over, and Trout Lilly and little white flowers whose names I forget at the moment. We explored the ancient piles of big rocks where long ago I buried my Guinea Pig Guinevere. No sign of Trilliums yet, though. By May they are usually all around the forest floor. After finding more deer prints and raccoon tracks near a swampy place, we finally headed back toward the house and our car, just as it began to get cloudy. It was a most  pleasant afternoon!

This reminded me of a few things I wrote last Friday, when I went out alone to some other woods where I spent time with my friends as a teenager. Here is what I wrote:

The voice of life is all around me; whispering, creaking, hissing; breathing through branches laced with budding new green. I reach down to touch a cluster of unfolding leaves; small and soft as velvet feathers. Their life force tingles through my fingers; a sensation of GREEN that is not a color but a taste; vibration, electricity tickling my skin; flowing like honey up through fingers and arms. It makes me laugh out loud! The voice of the forest speaks through a hazy aura of sun through high treetops; delicious air that moves and mingles with my own breath. Everywhere, among dark shadow and brown earth there is GREEN; subtle, vibrant, unstoppable GREEN of life returning; igniting the forest within me and without.

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