Being Present in the Woods
Dear Friends,
It seems everywhere I go in internet Christianland, I'm being constantly reminded that Lent is coming. Now, don't get me wrong. I believe in being well-prepared for liturgical seasons. Too often have Lent, Advent, Easter, and Christmas come upon me all of sudden and caught me unawares. So it is a good idea to think about what you good thing you may fast from, what vice and its corresponding virtue you want to focus on, and how you will give to those in need before Lent actually begins. But I fear that all this emphasis on preparation, weeks before the season itself, draw us into the same problems the secular world has with holidays.
For instance, think about how soon after Halloween both Christmas and Thanksgiving items go on sale, and how soon after Christmas, Valentine's Day candy and cards make their way onto our store shelves. We should not be like that, looking only to what is coming ahead. We need to focus on the present, to live in the moment in which we find ourselves.
To that end, I was recently reading through Malcolm Guite's latest collection of essays, Heaven in Ordinary. In one of the essays, he mentioned the poet and author Robert MacFarlane. MacFarlane is an author who is interested in the relationship between words and the things they signify. On Twitter, for a while, he was posting a word a day, giving us some insight or background to the word. Guite reflects on MacFarlane's post on the word liber or book in Latin. The word shares a root with the word for bark. This is likely due to the use of tree bark in making early books. But more importantly, it can draw our attention to the relationship between books and trees, library and forests. After I finished reading that and a few other essays, I took up my pen and wrote. What came out was a new poem which I want to share with you. But remember this, the world around us is so much deeper, so much richer, so much more real than we realize. It is connected to itself and to us in ways we can only imagine in part. So go walk amongst the trees and see what stories they have to tell.
“The Word Wood, or the Library Forest”
There are words in the wood, on every single branch,
Reaching out their arms to touch the sky.
They do not break and they will never blanch,
But they’ll keep trying, o yes, o yes, they’ll try
To reach us, to teach us, to find us and bring us in
To the dappled places, the darkened places
Below the earth, below the mushrooms grim
And down, and down to infinite root-filled spaces
Where we’ll be captured, raptured into tree veins
And feed the ones who feed us with their breath.
We’ll give up ourselves, the last of our remains
And breath the treeish words of life and death.
We hear the words bound up in forest wood;
We can become them, it will do us good.
Sincerely,
David Russell Mosley
