Sitting In the Woods

I’m in the woods again.

Winter has departed but the green of spring hasn’t yet arrived. The woods are just sitting here. Waiting. Black trees sticking out of a layer of brown leaves.

Not much is going on. The woodchuck is still hibernating. The deer haven’t come through in quite a while. The birds stopped coming to the feeder and are foraging somewhere else. And don’t get me started on the owl that’s been on vacation for six months. Everyday the woods look the same, although today fog is drifting through.

It’s like a great stone cathedral on a late afternoon after a liturgical season has ended. Quietness descends, and there is stillness where a short time ago a flurry of activity commanded center stage. The rituals have ended. The paraments folded away. The music has faded to echoes in the massive wooden rafters. People have returned home.

I like to be there in the time after because of the presence I feel sitting on a wooden pew in the dusk of that cavernous space. Red votives flicker up front. Stone pillars rise around me. Stained glass windows on the side glow deep blue in the last light of day.

This is what we have after the celebration ends. Memories. And hope.

I am not much for parades and grand celebrations. I’m more interested in the people standing in doorways after the parade has passed by. This is where most of us live. On the edges of life. Battered, bruised, broken, yet believing there is a way through the darkness. Living the days of ordinary time when there are no parades.

I like to sit in the forest on a wooden log and be surrounded by trees rising above me, by something greater than myself, something mysterious and powerful. Real.

In the woods, in cathedrals, and when I listen to people share the struggles and triumphs of their lives, I feel the movement of the sacred. Into this darkness, the morning's light is coming.

May I linger in the wild, unkempt places that remind me life is deeper than what I see.

As I walk the road with strangers, may we share our lives with each other in honest humility.